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It’s time to kill the web app

blog.plan99.net

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Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#541

Post by EGreg »

edoceo wrote: post #484
51stpage wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQL injection attacks are an excellent example where code and data are mixed. One solution is to do a lot of clever escaping of 'attackable' characters that instruct the DBMS to stop treating a character string as data and start executing things [1]. Escaping attackable characters attempts to partition data from code. This usually works but not perfectly. Or, run your data through stored procedures instead. It took m…

Parameter-ized query builders are possible in every SQL library. String escaping SQL? How is anyone thinking that is still a thing in 2017? The problem has been solved for two decades

Not just that, but they are great for sharding too.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#542

Post by Santosh83 »

nostrademons wrote: post #188
jacquesm wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they'll lose out to systems that promise security (and usually address a few specific attacks on the previous incumbent This happens in other areas besides applications as well. Programming languages, operating systems. This leads to an eternal re-invention of the wheel in different forms without ever really moving on.

Yep. Databases, web frameworks, GUI frameworks, editors, concurrency models, social networks, photo-sharing sites, and consumer reviews as well. Outside of computers, it applies to traffic, airlines, politics, publicly-traded companies, education & testing, and any industry related to "coolness" (fashion, entertainment, and all the niche fads that hipsters love). I refer to these as "unstable industries" - they all e…

> So for example, the key factor that makes an editor or new devtool popular is that it lets you accomplish your task and then gets out of the way, but when you've developed a successful editor or devtool, lots of programmers want to help work on it, they all want to make their mark, and suddenly it gets in your way instead of out of your way.

Only if it is open source. Seems like Sublime Text (just an example) has avoided this effect... perhaps evidence that open source is not the best model for every kind of software?

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#543

Post by Joeri »

hutzlibu wrote: post #270

I rather think, It's time, to completley ignore sensationalistic rant's like this one. First of, killing a technology does not solve anything. It just means less options. So do propose your better solution (and build it) - then we can talk about killing the current thing. But the way it is today, the web works. Definitely not flawless and in large parts really ugly (just browsing with open dev-tools is horrifying, wh…

The whole DOM and script languages in general are ugly? Skip it all and use only WebGL and Wasm.

Congratulations, now your app is inaccessible to screenreaders and doesn’t lay out properly on half the devices of the internet.

On every platform you have to use the native controls to build a good experience, but the web’s problem is that the native controls are the worst of every app ui platform ever made, so we get layer after layer of framework crud trying to hide the fact that html and css are almost completely unsuited for building app ui. I wish they had been a little more broken, because then someone would have had the sense to replace them.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#544

Post by hutzlibu »

emodendroket wrote: post #458
hutzlibu wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you want to rag on JSON, that's fine. It's not a great format" JSON is simple and powerfull. It's success justifies it, to call it a great format, I think. But I am curious, what whould be a great format, in your opinion?

I really wish it had a format for dates.

I use just a "time" number for it (but I also do not have dates before 1970)

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#546

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

emodendroket wrote: post #458
hutzlibu wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you want to rag on JSON, that's fine. It's not a great format" JSON is simple and powerfull. It's success justifies it, to call it a great format, I think. But I am curious, what whould be a great format, in your opinion?

I really wish it had a format for dates.

ISO 8601 [0] defines the standard for data elements and interchange formats. It's widely supported on all major programming languages.

The only issue is having to manually convert the string.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#547

Post by goatlover »

SquareWheel wrote: post #368
goatlover wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not. HTML and CSS are far from ideal for making applications. JS has gotten better, but it still lacking in some ways. And there is no IDE for the web, whereas Smalltalk had one in the 70s, and numerous ones have existed for other platforms since then.

IntelliJ has multiple IDEs for web development, or programming text editors like VS Code and Sublime. Even Chrome allows for a very fluid editing and debugging experience. Half the time I write my code directly in the browser.

I had in mind IDE with visual layout in a live environment such as Chrome's dev tools.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#548

Post by michaelmrose »

disordinary wrote: post #354
wpietri wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But modern UI in Office is only an evolution of what was there in the 90s and hasn't changed fundamentally either yet it doesn't feel any faster. Sure, and Office in the 90s didn't feel any faster than the word processing I was doing on an Apple II+ in middle school. This is because the people buying (and building) software care about other things than processor efficiency. If it's generally fast enough for their n…

Yes, so it's pointless for the author to say that a problem with Web Apps is that they're slower than native apps. It's redundant now days and a well designed web app using modern techniques should not feel any slower to an end user than a desktop app, in fact with the advanced rendering engines within modern web browsers they can feel more responsive and more usable than native.

I feel like this advice is coming from some alternate universe where this is actually so.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#549

Post by reitanqild »

projectant wrote: post #447
imtringued wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still haven't found a reliable way to save webpages. Firefox and wget won't download stylesheets or script tags generated by javascript. The only working approach is to print webpages as PDFs. It's a pretty terrible platform for documents.

That's a good point. How do you create a "local working archive" of a website? It's a really good idea. Want to get started on working on some project like this?

Scrapbook extension for Firefox (one of the winners from either the first or second extension context IIRC) used to do this in a fantastic way.

You could download

- a page on it's own

- a page an all pages recursively for up to 3 levels

- optionally filtered by domain or path inside domain

- optionally including javascript (IIRC)

Sadly this is now broken in the new extension model and fixing it doesn't seem to be a priority.

Firefox is still my favourite browser by far but my enthusiasm isn't as strong as it used to be.

On the bright side even if it doesn't seem to be a priority work seems to progress on bringing the new extension APIs to a point where several of the old extensions can be recreated.

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