The biggest challenge for decentralization is cost - who pays for the machines that run the code, irrespective of what the code is written in.
The reason we got centralized was simply who pays to power the chips!
A clean start for the web (2020)
71–80 of 200 posts
Re: A clean start for the web (2020)
#72I think the web is mostly good the way it is and I don't want to see it re-invented. In fact, I hate Flutter because it's not "webby". It renderers all content and controls using Canvas which means all there is on the page is pixels which means no accessibility since there is no standard structure (the DOM) to dig through to find the content. You might say there will be solutions like ideas to augment the canvas with…
The only reason you can dig through the data now is because the browser gives you tools to do that. The primitive view source or the more advanced dev tools. A web where everything is rendered to canvas would still need to get some data and there is no reason why the browser would not give you the tools to inspect that data.
Re: A clean start for the web (2020)
#73Just stop building your web "apps" on the client side. Why should I pay to save on your server costs.
An app is an app, a website is a website, don't try to make them the same thing always.
Re: A clean start for the web (2020)
#74> First, you need a minimal, standardized markup language for sending documents around
> Then, you need a browser.
I can't not think of the Alan Kay talk "The computer revolution hasnt happened yet" from 25 years ago. Some quotes:
"HTML on the internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes there should be a browser that understands its format."
"...ever more complex HTML formats, ever more intractable."
"You don't need a web browser".
And in fact, this was correct? The model that we have, now has a spec so enormous, that it's common knowledge that it's impossible to build a new browser from scratch (although maybe somebody can prove common knowledge wrong). And having document nodes that create a DOM tree might be useful for... something... but it has proven to be a gigantic obstacle in delivering content on the web. Almost everything we do today tries to ditch this because it's just so complicated, but all the frameworks that work around this give us magic and deal with it in the background. It's therefore still slow and it will always be slow.
So maybe to fix things we should try something other than what we already had that didn't work.
Re: A clean start for the web (2020)
#75What we need is for HTML to get going as a hypermedia again, to make the hypermedia architecture viable for a larger set of web applications. It's been stalled at anchors and forms (with only GET and POST!) for decades now. It's astounding how much we got built with just that. I'm trying to show where it could go with htmx: https://htmx.org Hypermedia (in particular the uniform interface) is what made the web special…
Am I the only one who is not excited by this new web idea ? As a web developer, we have to deal with framework and library major reinventions every couple of years and now you are telling me that you are going to reinvent browser rendering engines that we need to develop and test and then also your crappy reinventions . Thanks but no thanks . Please just build on top of giants . Not reinvent everything all the time .
Re: A clean start for the web (2020)
#76What we need is for HTML to get going as a hypermedia again, to make the hypermedia architecture viable for a larger set of web applications. It's been stalled at anchors and forms (with only GET and POST!) for decades now. It's astounding how much we got built with just that. I'm trying to show where it could go with htmx: https://htmx.org Hypermedia (in particular the uniform interface) is what made the web special…
I've always been shocked that HTML forms only support GET and POST and there's zero interest in supporting more HTTP methods in forms even in 2022. If forms supported the whole range of HTTP methods we could have a user facing web that's identical to a REST API, with different Accept and Content-type headers. Imagine how much development time we could save if forms supported DELETE and PUT!
That's pretty silly. This is like claiming the world would be fundamentally different if we used instead of . Anyone who thinks this is remotely useful is already doing it by either using ajax or by just overloading POST. We do not save development time by renaming a concept.
Re: A clean start for the web (2020)
#77this observation from 1997 always rings true. watch a few minutes starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY&t=1280s
Re: A clean start for the web (2020)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that article is exactly what we want on the internet. It's the kind of interactive teaching demonstrations that forward looking educators have been thinking about for decades. It's not bloated or overdone; it doesn't take up significantly more processing power; it works far better than a traditional article ever could. This is what we desire the internet to be like. It's because of articles like this one, or 3Blu…
Don't get me wrong, I like interactive documents a lot, but they also take a lot of time and effort to produce and thus will remain a minority. Texts greatly outweigh every other medium primarily because they are very easy to produce and distribute.
> they also take a lot of time and effort to produce
This is a case of bad tooling, not an intrinsic fact.
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/understanding-layout-algorit... is an article that could have easily been written without any interactive components. All the author did was replace traditional code blocks with an embed to a web playground (e.g. by s/Code/Playground/g in a MDX file). Ta-da, the demonstrations are immediately interactive.
> and thus will remain a minority.
Not if we put in effort to encourage them. On the other hand, if we put in effort to _discourage_ them (say, by splitting the web into documents without interaction and apps with interaction), they will disappear completely. It is not worth sacrificing these creations simply so that we can remove a few bad actors. (Mind you, there are many ways to act badly in non-interactive ways too. Image watermarks, embedded advertisements in videos, embedded advertisements in ASCII text...)
Re: A clean start for the web (2020)
#79What we need is for HTML to get going as a hypermedia again, to make the hypermedia architecture viable for a larger set of web applications. It's been stalled at anchors and forms (with only GET and POST!) for decades now. It's astounding how much we got built with just that. I'm trying to show where it could go with htmx: https://htmx.org Hypermedia (in particular the uniform interface) is what made the web special…
Am I the only one who is not excited by this new web idea ? As a web developer, we have to deal with framework and library major reinventions every couple of years and now you are telling me that you are going to reinvent browser rendering engines that we need to develop and test and then also your crappy reinventions . Thanks but no thanks . Please just build on top of giants . Not reinvent everything all the time .
New idea? Hypermedia is from 1965, and has been a thing since 1991; HTML. recursivedoubts HTMX library is cutting edge 2005 technology.
To add to both of your arguments, "JS-routers" like SvelteKit/NuxtJS/NextJS are literally reinventing server side rendering for the client to then call the actual server to get data ... to render HTML.
HTMX, LiveView, Livewire, Hotwire etc are escape hatches back to sanity.
Re: A clean start for the web (2020)
#80I think the web is mostly good the way it is and I don't want to see it re-invented. In fact, I hate Flutter because it's not "webby". It renderers all content and controls using Canvas which means all there is on the page is pixels which means no accessibility since there is no standard structure (the DOM) to dig through to find the content. You might say there will be solutions like ideas to augment the canvas with…
> As a user I want to be in control of the data that's on my machine. With a standard like HTML, it allows me, as a user, far FAR more control then a native app. I can use userstyle sheets. I can write and/or install extensions that look through or manipulate the content. None of this is possible if all I get is a rectangle of pixels.
Not only are you in a tiny minority of users who wish to do things like this, but most web applications out there go out of their way to stop you from doing those things and creators would almost certainly rather have a UI platform that did not allow you to do those things.