Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that the web browser evolved, by accident, into the closest thing we have to a portable and usable desktop OS . However, to me the browser is more like a "requirement statement", than a solution. The success of the web is just a symptom that: - users want applications that work on computers. Win vs Mac vs Linux vs Mobile vs ... is all nice and well for us geeks, but to real-world people, it's just a fri…
This is all pretty similar to what I've been imagining my ideal computing environment might look like. -Applications as single-objects that are stored and manipulated the same as any other file -Components (applications) compiled to some trivial-to-implement bytecode[0] as well as native -User-malleable UIs where components are tied together with events, message passing, and or pipelines of some kind -Public-key base…
Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal
61–70 of 85 posts
Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal
#62Grand Appification of The Web proposal does not fill me with joy. It seems like a way to drag the web backwards, in to the murk & mire that is iconified by big monolithic large applications. > The Grand Unification of Web Technologies is a proposal to unite all web technologies inside a browser creating a new, simple, more powerful and unified system. To achieve this, the functionality of HTML and CSS would be merged…
"gross and immoral" is uncalled for, and a pretty toxic way to start a conversation. And you keep saying users "expect documents" but where is that coming from? Most users on the internet today do not expect documents. I'd argue they don't really expect apps either, webpages live in kind of a world of their own. PS: I don't particularly care for this proposal, but clearly a lot of effort has gone into it and I find i…
> but clearly a lot of effort has gone into it and I find it "gross and immoral"
Wait until you find out how much effort goes into DRM schemes. It doesn’t make them any less anti-user which squarely lands in the immoral category for lots of people. Amount of effort and the engineering soundness of the design have no bearing on whether something is gross and/or immoral.
Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal
#63Maybe the next step of the "web" is just to fully embrace the browser as an app VM. Have one standard for reading Wikipedia, and another for running Figma in the browser. WASM + some common simple widget-esque API (like a small subset of Cocoa/GTK/QT). The browser provide implementations of some functionality like text-rendering and event handling, but then it's up to developer/frameworks to solve everything else.
I would argue that the web browser evolved, by accident, into the closest thing we have to a portable and usable desktop OS . However, to me the browser is more like a "requirement statement", than a solution. The success of the web is just a symptom that: - users want applications that work on computers. Win vs Mac vs Linux vs Mobile vs ... is all nice and well for us geeks, but to real-world people, it's just a fri…
The web made sharing information easy. That's it. That's all it did. Without the web, if I wanted to share information with you, I'd have to learn C, OS native GUI libraries, TCP/IP, and probably a bunch of other stuff if my information also had picture and sound. On the web, I just need HTML and I'm already a published author.
What would a post-modern operating system need to do to make sharing information easy?
Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
"gross and immoral" is uncalled for, and a pretty toxic way to start a conversation. And you keep saying users "expect documents" but where is that coming from? Most users on the internet today do not expect documents. I'd argue they don't really expect apps either, webpages live in kind of a world of their own. PS: I don't particularly care for this proposal, but clearly a lot of effort has gone into it and I find i…
> but clearly a lot of effort has gone into it and I find it "gross and immoral" Wait until you find out how much effort goes into DRM schemes. It doesn’t make them any less anti-user which squarely lands in the immoral category for lots of people. Amount of effort and the engineering soundness of the design have no bearing on whether something is gross and/or immoral.
wtf, you're comparing the work of someone who's a bit overexcited about redesigning the web, to DRM
do you even have an argument here?
Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal
#65TLDR: "After 30 years, developers are still struggling to build websites efficiently. Our hypothesis is that this is due to severe and acute design flaws in HTML, CSS, and the architecture of the web [...]. Our primary goal [...] is [...] the idea of a new, unified open web standard built around JavaScript".
Yes, this person wants to replace html/css/Javascript with Javascript + stuff.
Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal
#66>After 30 years, developers are still struggling to build websites efficiently.
Wrong. I could create a website very easily using FrontPage Express when I was a teenager. And today I can still build a website very easily using notepad or vim.
What's difficult is to emulate the user experience of a TV or an operating system using hypertext technologies (in the same way it's difficult to fix a car using cooking utensils).
Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Perhaps we would have been living in a world where Apple does not take a 30% cut from all sales happening on the iPhone. We already do. Apple doesn’t take a cut of things you purchase in the browser. Nor do they take a cut of in-app purchases when it’s not consumed on the device for that matter.
And in turn they cripple the web on their devices so they can’t compete with apps.
This is by far my biggest gripe with Apple. Almost everything else they do can be justified by some mental gymnastics, but their suppression of the web on iOS is something I can't forgive.
The size of their user base demands that we don't ignore Safari when developing sites, but they simultaneously refuse to support modern standards. They are literally holding back the web.
Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal
#68Great job. I largely agree with the concepts in this well thought out paper. I have built several commercial grade products and the front-end is always where the most pain and cost exist. By a long shot. If someone doesn't agree this layer needs a serious overhaul, they are not the ones paying the bill or have not build a large scale commercial product.
HTML and CSS are not clean, intuitive, or efficient beyond simple examples. Masters of these tools sadly have their heads full of legacy hacks and trickery needed to get content to display properly. Thank goodness there has been some consolidation on the V8 engine because without it, the hacks between browsers had already become exponential.
Contrast this with algorithms, the middle-tier, and databases. These tools, while not perfect, are far better able to express developer intentions and therefore be maintained.
Sadly, the Web stack has largely become popular due to OS politics. JS/HTML/CSS is the only real loophole devs currently have to build cross-platform products, which everyone wants because the expectations from users today are so high (expected to run everywhere on any device). It is good that we at least have this direction to build upon, but it doesn't mean that this is the ideal tech stack. There is alot of improvement to be had here.
For example, consider how much good VS Code and Typescript have brought to this space in recent years. The concepts of types, intellisense, async/await, and other efficiencies are great examples of historically native benefits brought to the Web.
Good work here. Keep pressing on - I salute you. Please consider making any progress you have made here open for review and validation. Cheers!
Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Perhaps we would have been living in a world where Apple does not take a 30% cut from all sales happening on the iPhone. We already do. Apple doesn’t take a cut of things you purchase in the browser. Nor do they take a cut of in-app purchases when it’s not consumed on the device for that matter.
And in turn they cripple the web on their devices so they can’t compete with apps.
And yet many of us prefer safari because of its incredible battery life and low overhead. The safari is the new ie meme is seriously overblown and only affects app developers trying to use the absolutely newest features and is more tied to safaris year long release cadence than actual malice. Not that there arent a few notable exceptions to apis that should have been implemented long ago.
Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your talking the web of 1990-2010, fact is most websites today are heavily reliant on - or even exclusively created in - javascript. Even if most websites wouldn't use the interactivity of JS, there is no reason for there to be three different standards. All those plain-text websites can be created in JSON just as well. The argument is, there is no need for plain HTML at this point, so why is this the base standard?
I still don't understand how people think they're going to build a website in pure JS. I built a template preprocessor that lets me write all my HTML and CSS with the same syntax as a big JSON file, or a JS module if I want to drop in some loops and includes, and even working on replacing the JS with syntax that fits in the JSON file. But I still need a way to think about "this box sits next to this box" and "this ma…
OP's doc solves this issue in great detail