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It’s time to kill the web app

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Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#641

Post by mwcampbell »

pendar747 wrote: post #586
usr1106 wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can assume that many HN readers are closely related to Web programming. Either they do it themselves or their wage gets paid because their employers' business depends on Web apps. If the article is right that it is close to impossible to hire a Web developer that understands all Web security issues and knows to mitigate them, it does not come as a surprise that there is fierce criticism to the article. It basicall…

The author definitely has valid arguments about web's security but I think the rest of his arguments are all lazy, anecdotal and not accurate. Comparing Google Docs to an old version of Office for example. They are incomparable firstly because they are running on completely different platforms. Office would take a long time to install while Google Docs are available almost instantly, they can be updated almost instan…

> flexibility in UI/UX design that is available on the Web

If you take advantage of that flexibility to create a UX that's very different from the standard widgets, it's likely to be inaccessible to blind users with screen readers. Check out this rant on HN from a blind friend of mine (a few paragraphs in for the part that's most relevant to this thread):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14580342

As far as I know, the most accessible cross-platform UI toolkit for the desktop is SWT. It uses native widgets for most things, and actually gasp implements the host platforms' accessibility APIs for the custom widgets. But, I can hear it now, somebody will say they hate SWT-based applications because they wreak of Windows 95. Oh well, fashion trumps all, I guess.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#642

Post by alkonaut »

otakucode wrote: post #409
api wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS really had rapid GUI development absolutely nailed in the late 90s. For some reason we forgot all that.

I was really surprised when I went and wanted to build a GUI app to find that everyone had abandoned the WYSIWG model completely. You can't just drag your controls over, set their properties, then build the code to drive everything. You have to manually wrestle with containers and whatnot even for desktop things. I could potentially see it as an acceptable tradeoff for wide device compatibility (things with substanti…

WPF still works nicely for prototyping in a visual editor. Declarative is much more robust than the old imperative awt/swing/winforms.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#643

Post by pjmlp »

rtpg wrote: post #561
smsm42 wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could disable ActiveX and Java and be reasonably confident that visiting a webpage would not pwn my computer Unfortunately, this is not entirely true. There were bugs in image processing, PDF processing (some browsers would load it without user prompting), Flash, video decoders, etc. IIRC even in JS engines, though those are more rare. Of course, you could go text-only, but then you couldn't properly access about…

When there would be a bug in PDF processing, you end up with a RCE, right? But downloading an EXE is basically allowing arbitrary code execution on your machine no matter what. So _even with the security bugs_, webapps are basically safer than installing a native app on desktop, at least in its current state. I see your point though. There are still a lot of entry points we need to be careful about

It doesn't help that curl | sh has become trendy.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#644

Post by mwcampbell »

justin1364 wrote: post #621
Fej wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be the biggest dichotomy I've yet seen on HN. An opinion piece voted all the way to the top of the front page (with a clickbaity title, might I add), yet the top comment soundly debunks the article's arguments. Yeah, this is why everybody clicks on the comments link first.

Maybe this reflects insecurity (in the psychological sense) from the community of people who love the web? That in itself is interesting. Fwiw, long live the web. It's imperfect, but it's open. I'll take chaotic freedom to tight control any day.

> I'll take chaotic freedom to tight control

FWIW, I'd take tight control if it was in pursuit of humanitarian values, such as accessibility for people with disabilities, rather than a company's bottom line. The chaotic freedom of the Web isn't very good for accessibility. Yes, yes, accessibility is possible, but in practice, very often it doesn't happen. See this rant on HN from a blind friend of mine (yes, the same one I posted elsewhere on the thread, but it drives the point of this comment home):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14580342

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#645

Post by bayonetz »

thecrazyone wrote: post #393
bayonetz wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but it's crazy that it took 20 years to get sane layout control.

Well _it is_ crazy. We can't trace an alternate history and work with that. We work with what we have. I think, here, we might looking at it with the wrong lens. I'm unable to find the right words to say this. Let me say this statement feels ungrateful. Web is the largest and fastest growing ecosystem of software we've right now (refer: community size, number of projects on github, say, in Javascipt, CSS, and other w…

Fair enough. I just get sad knowing what I'm missing. I've worked with a bunch of desktop GUI builder IDEs (Visual Basic, .Net WinForms, WPF/XAML, and Qt) and I've seen the immense power they have in terms of developer productivity and application performance. Something like XAML is especially interesting because it brings the styling and responsiveness of HTML/CSS to the GUI builder paradigm. I started off with them and then have slowly transitioned to working entirely with web technologies (PHP, Rails, Angular, React, you name it). Not without reluctance for sure! It's a Faustian bargain to me -- trading off overall inferior technology and developer experience for the sheer reach and ease of deployment of the web. It's nuts to me to design a visual thing like a UI by writing lines of code. The GUI builders of yore really nailed this by allowing you to design something visual using a visual modality (drag n drop, realtime layout designers, etc.). I try to explain this folks who've only ever developed for web and usually their eyes glaze over. They can't seem to (or have an incentive not to?) appreciate the impedance mismatches and the fundamental trades being made with web user interfaces.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#646

Post by bayonetz »

I just get sad knowing what I'm missing. I've worked with a bunch of desktop GUI builder IDEs (Visual Basic, .Net WinForms, WPF/XAML, and Qt) and I've seen the immense power they have in terms of developer productivity and application performance. Something like XAML is especially interesting because it brings the styling and responsiveness of HTML/CSS to the GUI builder paradigm. I started off with them and then have slowly transitioned to working entirely with web technologies (PHP, Rails, Angular, React, you name it). Not without reluctance for sure! It's a Faustian bargain to me -- trading off overall inferior technology and developer experience for the sheer reach and ease of deployment of the web. It's nuts to me to design a visual thing like a UI by writing lines of code. The GUI builders of yore really nailed this by allowing you to design something visual using a visual modality (drag n drop, realtime layout designers, etc.). I try to explain this folks who've only ever developed for web and usually their eyes glaze over. They can't seem to (or have an incentive not to?) appreciate the impedance mismatches and the fundamental trades being made with web user interfaces.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#647

Post by alkonaut »

pcwalton wrote: post #419
catnaroek wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it has basically zero understanding of flexible layouts. That's largely a non-issue to me. If I need anything fancy, I'll draw it myself. The simple stuff ought to be simple. > As a result, things break as soon as you try to make an easily resizable window Au contraire! It is much easier to make a resizable window when you are in full control of how nested widgets are resized along with it. That being said, some au…

CSS is incredibly simple if all you care about is absolute positioning. It's just that nobody wants to make a Win32 style app with absolute positioning on the Web. That's because responsive apps are superior to nonresizable, manually positioned UIs.

When the VB/MFC layout was replaced it was with WPF. WPF is declarative, flexible, handles high resolutions well etc.

It's what I imagine a reasonable HTML/CSS would look like.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#648

Post by twsted »

wozer wrote: post #272
mikebenfield wrote: post #20

It'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…

It doesn't have to be complicated. A single page app implemented with React, calling some REST Api to retrieve and store its data, is basically all you need.

And you don't even need React for that.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#649

Post by pjmlp »

int_19h wrote: post #566
tluyben2 wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. And yes, that needs some attention, but most people doing responsive web do not account for most of that either. What does changing fonts mean? You design something for a font and then change it afterwards or? When I click on some languages (I am not native English and my native language, Dutch, is not very high on the list of priorities for most companies) in some of the biggest companies in the world, you n…

> And yes, that needs some attention, but most people doing responsive web do not account for most of that either. What does changing fonts mean? You design something for a font and then change it afterwards or? Think about user changing the default UI font. OS X and Windows both make it difficult to impossible, and for this exact reason. On Linux, though, it's common and expected (which is probably why all UI framew…

> WPF in particular is a good example of an XML-based markup language specifically for UI, and it's light years ahead of HTML5 in terms of how easy it is to achieve common things, and how flexible things are overall.

This is why I had big hopes in XHTML and the XML components, but then we got HTML5 instead, yet another pile of hacks.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#650

Post by jiggunjer »

oblib wrote: post #620
jiggunjer wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HTML,CSS, and Javascript separate the layers of a web app fairly nicely. Except they don't. Most devs aren't even aware of what divs they are using for pure styling vs semantically correct ones. They think all the html they write is by definition semantic. Then there are the less frequent but even more insidious cases where css is used for content.

Does that really make a difference? Seems to me that's a feature that's generally described as "more than one way to do it" and the goal is getting the app working and shipped not to appease some outside critic's sense of semantics.

Styling separable from content is the direction W3 wants to go. So being aware and adhering as much as possible should improve performance and long-term maintenance burden.

I agree the tradeoff probably isn't worth the extra time needed to carefully structure your html and do css acrobatics.

I just get triggered when someone claims the holy trinity idea works good with html/css/js. It doesn't, but that's OK.

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