Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HTML is the Web

petelambert.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 341 posts

Re: HTML is the Web

#71

Post by moviuro »

brightball wrote: post #67
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…

That view of the browser is what I want to have. It blows my mind that we still have to tell people “don’t click links in your email” because it’s still possible for something terrible to happen if they do.

> for something terrible to happen if they [click links in their email].

There are very few RCEs now on modern browser (they still exist[0,1], though). The main threat is phishing, because users are gullible (and should be educated).

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2019-1...

[1] https://objective-see.com/blog/blog_0x43.html

And: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283922

Re: HTML is the Web

#72

Post by nickjj »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #66
nickjj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you kidding me? Flash was an absurdly popular platform. Careers were launched on Newgrounds! I'm not saying it wasn't popular, but what do you think the percent spread was between sites that were fully driven by Flash vs not Flash? I don't have the stats in front of me, but I would guess it was probably 2% Flash vs 98% non-Flash. Now, a lot of sites had sprinkles of Flash but very few sites in the grand scheme…

> very few sites in the grand scheme of things were solely rendered with Flash ...yeah, because that's not what Flash was about. Flash was an application platform (ok, so more like an Animation platform) first and foremost. Why would anyone run their whole site in flash? It wasn't the right tool for that job.

> Flash was an application platform (ok, so more like an Animation platform) first and foremost. Why would anyone run their whole site in flash? It wasn't the right tool for that job.

And this is exactly what I'm trying to say.

Back in the day you would very likely reach for Flash if you wanted to build an FTP client that ran in a browser. Totally reasonable use case because that's a highly interactive app that doesn't really follow the request / response style of a document style page. But you likely wouldn't reach for Flash to build some type of site that presented data in a document style (pretty much the general use case of what a website outputs).

But if you fast forward to today's technology, some front end developers are bringing in the complexity of creating SPA style applications that are primarily rendered with JS for everything -- even document style websites like a personal blog and the original comment I replied to is hinting they want to remove constraints from browsers to give us more of a FFA style of doing whatever we want to render pages. I was just saying that model didn't really take off for the general use case with Flash decades ago.

Fortunately we still live in a time where web developers can choose what they want to do, but browsers shouldn't change the concept of being something that renders HTML that is optionally combined with other things like CSS, fonts, JS and images.

Re: HTML is the Web

#73

Post by TeMPOraL »

flohofwoe wrote: post #60
cesarb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Which is a problem that needs to be pushed back against. SaaS is a step backwards in our relationship with our machines.

Re: HTML is the Web

#74

Post by lmm »

nickjj wrote: post #32
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…

> 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". Flash tried to do this 15-20 years ago. Flash was basically "here's a canvas, do whatever you want within reason". It had its use cases back then but the general web vastly prefer…

The general web loved Flash for cases where you needed an application rather than a document. It wasn't appropriate for everything, and it was unfortunately very difficult to mix Flash with general HTML, but in many ways it was better than today's web for both creators and end users.

Re: HTML is the Web

#75

Post by rimliu »

manbearpiggy wrote: post #55
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.

Or rather anyone starting a new project should think long and hard "is this a page or is this an app?". Too many web pages think of themselves as apps without any real reason to do so.

Re: HTML is the Web

#76

Post by onion2k »

bandrami wrote: post #39
onion2k wrote: post #5

A Web page is a document. No it's not. It never was. Even a long time ago when websites were static things rendered by the browser once and then left alone there was always a tree of nodes underlying everything. The only thing that's changed in the past three decades is that now when we make websites and web apps we often ship a little JS application that lets the user modify the underlying tree. That's what the web…

> Users demanded interactivity (Citation needed.) Developers love interactivity. Users despise it but put up with it because there's not much choice. Does anybody think the Web is a better experience now than it was 15 years ago? Honestly?

(Citation needed.)

They didn't demand it per se because no one actually asked. I'm inferring from the fact that users spent much more time on the interactive websites which resulted in more revenue for those sites and everyone else copying. There might have been a reason other than the interactivity itself, but we are where we are now because of user behaviour.

Re: HTML is the Web

#77

Post by bo1024 »

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…

I'm inclined to disagree, but I guess the real problem is that webpages on the internet are being forced to serve both purposes.

Paradigm 1 - interconnected, hyperlinked web of text-and-content-based documents: open, accessible, amenable to indexing and tooling and so forth.

Paradigm 2 - delivery vehicle for cross-platform, full-featured, somewhat-security-sandboxed, applications.

I agree with the article that it's sad if Paradigm 1 is trampled to make way for Paradigm 2, just because (as you point out) we haven't been able to develop a viable alternative. In theory these could coexist, but the point of the article is people are being trained in Paradigm 2 and try to use it for purposes that are much more suited for Paradigm 1.

Just as sad, Paradigm 1 is more oriented around decentralization, giving power, options, and information to the user; Paradigm 2 is often exploited for lock-in, control over user's decisions, collecting information about the user, etc.

Re: HTML is the Web

#78

Post by rimliu »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #7
meerita wrote: post #3

I pretty much agree with all the article. Back in 2001, when Web Standards were on the rise, people used to validate their HTML code. It was shown as a badge of prestige when you had 0 errors. Semantic HTML was a hot topic and most of the developers I worked with were a sort of HTML taliban. But the popularity of frameworks helped developers forget the basics and concentrate more on learning how to get the most out o…

All my webpages had the valid xhtml badge! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Valid_XHTML_1.0.svg I still have a hard time un-learning ` `

Opening can of worms: did you serve them with any of the available XML MIME types? If not they worked simply because of the bug in the browsers (SHORTTAG means a different thing in HTML compared to XML) and all XHTML code served with HTML MIME type would be littered with ">" if browser treated it right ;)

Re: HTML is the Web

#79

Post by rimliu »

kowdermeister wrote: post #30

What is the point the author is making? That the knowledge of HTML is going away? That's obviously false. > And it is becoming increasingly clear to me that there’s a whole swathe of Frontend Engineers who don’t know or understand the frontend-est of frontend technologies. I would need some data on this, since it sounds like this claim is backed by anecdotes. None of my co-workers struggle with this and there's lot o…

I would not consider knowing "a bit of CSS" as knowing and understanding frontend-est of frontend technologies. Alas, there are more than enough cluches available in the form of variouos frameworks so throwing enough stuff at the wall fill finally make some of it stick hence replacing the need of knowledge and understanding.

Re: HTML is the Web

#80

Post by whoisthemachine »

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…

I think you need to take into context the history of browsers vs. operating systems... operating systems were always a platform, while browsers started as consumers of an electronic document standard.

That being said - I agree with your ideal, and I don't think it's far off. HTML as a view engine combined with WASM as a cross-platform runtime can enable truly cross-platform, industry-standard native applications. I think it's only a matter of time until Electron apps morph into cross-platform native apps running off of a thin WASM layer. Once those are available, then the OS vendors will have a huge competitive advantage if they develop fast native WASM runtimes.

Post reply on HN