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HTML is the Web

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Re: HTML is the Web

#51

Post by flohofwoe »

snlacks wrote: post #42
flohofwoe wrote: post #9

Unpopular opinion... but I think this is a too limited view of the web. My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police". It would be nice if operating systems would be exactly that, but for some reason "commercial" OS vendors are…

No one's delivered? There were and are plenty of platforms for full apps on the web. All of them require: loading each time or elevated privileges above the normal browser. This is not the reason they haven't taken off. Security isn't the reason either. It isn't used because it's just not how the suppliers of content nor consumers of the web want to use the web. If they want a full featured app, they use it. Even wit…

IMHO the word "installed app" shouldn't even exist. What's the use of "installing" an application these days?

Of course this goes hand in hand with an instant start (no dreaded splash screens please), and not having to download gigabytes upon gigabytes of data upfront.

Modern web apps might be bad at this, and browser engines might be bloated, but native apps aren't any better (even heavy web pages still load many times faster than - for instance - starting Visual Studio or Photoshop).

Re: HTML is the Web

#52

Post by snlacks »

flohofwoe wrote: post #51
snlacks wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one's delivered? There were and are plenty of platforms for full apps on the web. All of them require: loading each time or elevated privileges above the normal browser. This is not the reason they haven't taken off. Security isn't the reason either. It isn't used because it's just not how the suppliers of content nor consumers of the web want to use the web. If they want a full featured app, they use it. Even wit…

IMHO the word "installed app" shouldn't even exist. What's the use of "installing" an application these days? Of course this goes hand in hand with an instant start (no dreaded splash screens please), and not having to download gigabytes upon gigabytes of data upfront. Modern web apps might be bad at this, and browser engines might be bloated, but native apps aren't any better (even heavy web pages still load many ti…

What's the issue? There's two that are unavoidable.

The maximum speed of moving data from one physical place to another, moving data from the hard drive to the motherboard and the ram to the cpu/cache is faster than from the internet to a computer. To he speed of light is still noticably slow when you're making round trips to get data.

The other issue is configuration, even if automated, software needs to make decisions about how to deal with different hardware and system differences. This takes time to bootstrap after initial load increase time to usuability or it can be done on the fly slowing down the interactions.

Re: HTML is the Web

#53

Post by cesarb »

flohofwoe wrote: post #51
snlacks wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one's delivered? There were and are plenty of platforms for full apps on the web. All of them require: loading each time or elevated privileges above the normal browser. This is not the reason they haven't taken off. Security isn't the reason either. It isn't used because it's just not how the suppliers of content nor consumers of the web want to use the web. If they want a full featured app, they use it. Even wit…

IMHO the word "installed app" shouldn't even exist. What's the use of "installing" an application these days? Of course this goes hand in hand with an instant start (no dreaded splash screens please), and not having to download gigabytes upon gigabytes of data upfront. Modern web apps might be bad at this, and browser engines might be bloated, but native apps aren't any better (even heavy web pages still load many ti…

> What's the use of "installing" an application these days?

Once I "install" an application, for example libreoffice:

- It works even if I do not have a working Internet connection (or back in the day, even if I had removed the original media from the drive);

- It works even if the original is gone.

That is, by "installing" an application, I gain a permanent, offline, working copy of it.

Re: HTML is the Web

#54

Post by amelius »

flohofwoe wrote: post #9

Unpopular opinion... but I think this is a too limited view of the web. My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police". It would be nice if operating systems would be exactly that, but for some reason "commercial" OS vendors are…

Indeed, a browser should be just a sandbox, nothing more.

All the HTML+CSS+JS stuff only makes browsers difficult to secure, and also causes bloat and performance issues when they are not needed.

Furthermore, all these hairy web specifications cause compatibility issues, and are a barrier to entry for new browser makers.

If people want HTML or CSS or JS, then they should implement these inside the sandbox. In practice, this would mean that developers would simply include one of the standard libs for rendering HTML, etc., and these standard libraries can be cached by the browser, so their use does not cause performance/bandwidth penalties.

Re: HTML is the Web

#55

Post by manbearpiggy »

gargravarr wrote: post #38

The biggest takeaway is that HTML was originally designed to degrade gracefully. If your browser didn't support the intended graphical layout, it would still be able to extract the hierarchy and display a usable web page, even if you were using pure text (e.g. lynx). This kept the web accessible no matter what you were using. These days, none of that occurs. Just try switching off Javascript (I use NoScript heavily t…

Web pages should be designed to load without js.

Re: HTML is the Web

#56

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

nickjj wrote: post #45
flohofwoe wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash had several problems that should have been addressed differently. Among others: - it was owned and controlled by a single company and thus a target for other companies instead of other companies helping to improve it - that single company was unable or unwilling to fix security holes in the sandbox and browser makers eventually got fed up with that - while there were some ways to interact with the underlying br…

Those were all problems but none of them had any real bearing on the general population avoiding it for general sites. The thing is, most people don't want a blank canvas to go nuts with for the general use case. It's too complicated. Suddenly you need to learn entire SDKs and pull in many dependencies just to render text on the screen. The reason HTML and the web was so well accepted back in the day was all you had…

> The thing is, most people don't want a blank canvas to go nuts with for the general use case.

Are you kidding me? Flash was an absurdly popular platform. Careers were launched on Newgrounds!

Re: HTML is the Web

#57

Post by zemnmez »

> My big concern is at the bottom of that technology pyramid. The lowest common denominator of the Web. The foundation. The rhythm section. The ladyfingers in the Web trifle. It’s the HTML.

This is perhaps an annoying pedantic answer, but I feel like this discounts what HTML actually represents, and what the Javascript libraries operate on, which is the DOM, bypassing HTML syntax often completely. The HTML, fundamentally is a representation of this Document Object Model, and if we're to be essentialist, HTML's success relies on good fundamental ideas of what kind of document it generates.

I do, however absolutely agree that the semantic representation of a document is important, and HTML's ideas of what a good representation of a document looks like really do shape the success of the web. This is why in very successful frameworks like React for example go so far as to implement their own pseudo-HTML transpiler that turns HTML-like representations of DOM nodes into DOM construction calls.

That said, I think there is a certain kind of essentiallism echoed in this post that goes along the lines of 'everything can't just be s with classes' and I agree with that, but I don't think it has to do with writing more HTML-like DOM trees as much as augmenting the DOM to integrate more modern representations of DOM operation. I hope that in the future, systems like React leverage something similar to Custom Elements to truly represent their functionality in the DOM tree, as God intended ;)

Re: HTML is the Web

#58

Post by meerita »

onion2k wrote: post #15
meerita wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, definitions of HTML are widely clear: "Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser." If a document has interactivity, that doesn't mean it will lose its definition.

That's why I suggested maybe HTML isn't the right language for defining the initial tree state of a web app these days, but it's what we've got so it's what we use. I think web apps, and web pages too to some extent, have outgrown HTML.

Maybe in the future, W3C would do a solid AML Application Markup Language, but they did that with XML.

Re: HTML is the Web

#59

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

amelius wrote: post #54
flohofwoe wrote: post #9

Unpopular opinion... but I think this is a too limited view of the web. My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police". It would be nice if operating systems would be exactly that, but for some reason "commercial" OS vendors are…

Indeed, a browser should be just a sandbox, nothing more. All the HTML+CSS+JS stuff only makes browsers difficult to secure, and also causes bloat and performance issues when they are not needed. Furthermore, all these hairy web specifications cause compatibility issues, and are a barrier to entry for new browser makers. If people want HTML or CSS or JS, then they should implement these inside the sandbox. In practic…

I agree. If we want an application platform, let's have something designed first and foremost to be an application platform instead of the garbage fire we've bolted to the skeleton of HTML.

Here's how you do it: create the new platform and its spec. Include an open 'document rendering engine' to replace that portion of the web. For backwards compatibility, go ahead and port a web browser to the new platform. For forwards compatibility, port the new platform to the current web.

Re: HTML is the Web

#60

Post by flohofwoe »

cesarb wrote: post #53
flohofwoe wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO the word "installed app" shouldn't even exist. What's the use of "installing" an application these days? Of course this goes hand in hand with an instant start (no dreaded splash screens please), and not having to download gigabytes upon gigabytes of data upfront. Modern web apps might be bad at this, and browser engines might be bloated, but native apps aren't any better (even heavy web pages still load many ti…

> What's the use of "installing" an application these days? Once I "install" an application, for example libreoffice: - It works even if I do not have a working Internet connection (or back in the day, even if I had removed the original media from the drive); - It works even if the original is gone. That is, by "installing" an application, I gain a permanent, offline, working copy of it.

Most of this isn't a given anymore with software vendors going subscription-only like Adobe's Creative Cloud.

On the other hand, PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) also work in offline mode without a "traditional" installation step.

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