Until I can block ads in web apps, I'll keep my browser thanks.
And you can't block ads in youtube, instagram or fb apps.
It’s time to kill the web app
61–70 of 717 posts
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#62I find this unconvincing. Every negative thing said about the web is true of every other platform, so far. It just seems to ignore how bad software has always been (on average). "Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's." The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs. "Web apps are impossible to secure." Programs in the 90s were written in C and C++. C is impossible to secure. C++ is im…
> "Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's." > The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs. Yes, this reminds me of: "Wasn't all this done years ago at Xerox PARC? (No one remembers what was really done at PARC, but everyone else will assume you remember something they don't.)" [1] > "Buffers that don’t specify their length" > Is this really a common problem in web apps? Most web app…
"Most injection attacks are due to this; if html used length-prefixed tags rather than open/close tags most injection attacks would go away immediately."
How so? If you allow the user to send arbitrary data, and your handling of that data is where the problem lies, it isn't going to matter whether the client sends a length-prefixed piece of data. You still have to sanitize that data.
HTML, and whether it uses closing tags or not, is pretty much irrelevant to the way injection attacks work, as far as I can tell. Maybe I'm missing something...do you have an example or a reference to how this could solve injection attacks?
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#63It's probably not realistic, but I would love to see the web be completely thrown out and replaced with something reasonable. I write a decent amount of native code. I write Rust, C, and x64 assembly. I think I'm pretty good at this stuff. But the web is too much for me. Any time I think I'd like to do something with the web and sit down to learn, it's completely overwhelming. I've never been able to put together a c…
The thing is, though, the web is reasonable - for its intended purpose, which is displaying and interlinking documents. And despite the complaints, faults and shortcomings, it's even remarkably not as bad as it could be at being an application platform. Throwing that out because it's less than optimal at a use case it was never intended to serve would be monumentally short-sighted. Just build something else and leave…
I think what he meant was "throw out the web as a platform for applications", not as a platform for document distributions.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#64>In part 2 I’ll propose a new app platform that is buildable by a small group in a reasonable amount of time, and which (IMHO) should be much better than what we have today... Next time: how we can do that. i look forward to that article. This one, on the other hand, seems a little pointless. Does the web have problems? yes, absolutely. But I have a hard time believing the best way to solve them it to tear down every…
I agree.
People seem to think that there was a time when the internet was better than it is today. Well, I've been 'online' since before the web was world wide. Frankly, it was never good.
In fact, it is better now than it has ever been. It's just people choose to use the worst parts of it.
I've seen the various tech that was supposed to rebuild and revolutionize the web. It's just created more kludge. It's just lipstick on a pig. It's just one more set of standards that get half-ass implementations and even worse support.
If you tear it down and rebuild it, it's just going to end up the same except it is using different names for the protocols.
I'm not angry when stuff breaks. I'm amazed it works at all.
And, truthfully, I kinda like it the way it is. We have, at our fingertips, vast amounts of information and entertainment. It works, after a fashion and for some definition of 'works.' If the Internet sucks for them, maybe they should look elsewhere? The Internet is huge. It's not hard to find parts that don't suck.
Tearing down and rebuilding isn't going to work and nobody is going to invest in that. Hell, we can't even get ubiquitous IPv6 adoption. Not one browser is fully compliant with HTML5. And it's okay. It works, mostly.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#65My understanding of HEIST is that it is completely defeated by disabling compression on dynamic content. That doesn't seem to be "the end of the web" to me...
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#66I find this unconvincing. Every negative thing said about the web is true of every other platform, so far. It just seems to ignore how bad software has always been (on average). "Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's." The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs. "Web apps are impossible to secure." Programs in the 90s were written in C and C++. C is impossible to secure. C++ is im…
> Programs in the 90s were written in C and C++. C is impossible to secure. C++ is impossible to secure. Many programs in the 90s, especially of the simple CRUD type, were written in VisualBasic and other RAD tools, as they were known at the time, and later Java. > Is this really a common problem in web apps? Most web apps are built in languages that don't have buffer overrun problems. It's not buffer overrun in the…
"Many programs in the 90s, especially of the simple CRUD type, were written in VisualBasic and other RAD tools, as they were known at the time, and later Java."
And, we complained endlessly about how slow and bloated those programs were. So it goes.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#67The reason the web platform is "ugly" is because nobody owns it. Multiple players need to get on the same page in order for things to happen. The end result is not pretty (different browser versions behave differently, incomplete specs, etc.), but one thing is constant - nobody owns the platform.
This is important because of things like this [1]. You may dislike some apps' mission, or approach to moderating content, but you cannot outright ban it from your platform, if you don't own the platform.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/gab-the-right-wi...
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#68> First, use an XSRF token as discussed earlier to make sure that JSON results containing confidential data are only returned to your own pages. Is this necessary for GET requests that return JSON? You need to include a XSRF token in the request headers?
Ideally browsers should block cross-domain requests by default (so no XSRF is possible), but sadly this would break compatibility with older sites. Maybe we should make new HTTP methods (like SAFEPOST) with builtin XSRF protection and switch new apps to them?
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#69Quite a bit ironic that you need js to actually see the images in that article.
I can see the images without JS enabled.
Re: It’s time to kill the web app
#70I find this unconvincing. Every negative thing said about the web is true of every other platform, so far. It just seems to ignore how bad software has always been (on average). "Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's." The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs. "Web apps are impossible to secure." Programs in the 90s were written in C and C++. C is impossible to secure. C++ is im…
My alarm siren went off when the commentary started critiquing the “complexity” of Google docs as compared to Windows explorer circa 1998.
Complex things are often complex because the work that we do as humans is, well, complicated.
A journey map painstakingly built by an epic designer and smart person at large may design the ultimate document template that addresses every need that you are aware of. Then I come along and want something else.
When the answer is that everything is wrong, the question is usually wrong.