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>One thing I'm absolutely flabbergasted about is that we as a community have spent the last 10 years trying to get everyone to serve valid semantic markup, only

by Hytosys 11y ago

>One thing I'm absolutely flabbergasted about is that we as a community have spent the last 10 years trying to get everyone to serve valid semantic markup, only to throw it all away. This tastes just as vile as using tables everywhere. Using a DOM manipulation engine does not disqualify the developer from producing perfectly semantic markup.

kijin 11y ago
Sure, but that beautiful markup only exists inside the Developer Tools of modern browsers, and only thanks to several megabytes of scripts that waste my time, data, and battery. Good luck loading that page with whatever the most popular browser is in 2040, or on archive.org if the original website has long disappeared.
- Hytosys 11y ago
  You believe that HTML won't be deprecated by 2040, but JS will? You also believe archive.org won't make an effort to store JS files within that timeframe? The reality is that the modern web depends on JS, and the argument of deprecation won't change that anytime soon. We're moving forward, not backward. On a technical note, there is quite some effort in rendering React/Angular apps on the server in case it's serving an outdated browser. Edit: just realized that of course storing JS files isn't the solution to archive.org's challenge, it's storing server responses.
  - kijin 11y ago
    JS is a lot more fragile than HTML. It won't be difficult to extract useful information from a static HTML document 25 years from now, even if it doesn't render correctly. Actually, we do that already with static HTML documents written 20-25 years ago. But there's no guarantee that a script with lots of moving parts written today will run without errors on a future browser, especially if it stopped being maintained sometime in the middle. Why do we need so many moving parts to display a goddamn blog post? It's a mostly static document, after all. There's no reason it shouldn't be readable with NoScript on, or even in a terminal-based browser like lynx, with a very small number of HTTP requests. The reality is that only some parts of the modern web depends on JS. Hiring five people to change a lightbulb is not "moving forward", it's just wasteful.
  - rimantas 11y ago
    web is not moving forward. It moves sideways at best, and runs in circles at worst.

by Hytosys 11y ago

kijin 11y ago

Sure, but that beautiful markup only exists inside the Developer Tools of modern browsers, and only thanks to several megabytes of scripts that waste my time, data, and battery. Good luck loading that page with whatever the most popular browser is in 2040, or on archive.org if the original website has long disappeared.

Hytosys 11y ago
You believe that HTML won't be deprecated by 2040, but JS will? You also believe archive.org won't make an effort to store JS files within that timeframe? The reality is that the modern web depends on JS, and the argument of deprecation won't change that anytime soon. We're moving forward, not backward. On a technical note, there is quite some effort in rendering React/Angular apps on the server in case it's serving an outdated browser. Edit: just realized that of course storing JS files isn't the solution to archive.org's challenge, it's storing server responses.
- kijin 11y ago
  JS is a lot more fragile than HTML. It won't be difficult to extract useful information from a static HTML document 25 years from now, even if it doesn't render correctly. Actually, we do that already with static HTML documents written 20-25 years ago. But there's no guarantee that a script with lots of moving parts written today will run without errors on a future browser, especially if it stopped being maintained sometime in the middle. Why do we need so many moving parts to display a goddamn blog post? It's a mostly static document, after all. There's no reason it shouldn't be readable with NoScript on, or even in a terminal-based browser like lynx, with a very small number of HTTP requests. The reality is that only some parts of the modern web depends on JS. Hiring five people to change a lightbulb is not "moving forward", it's just wasteful.
- rimantas 11y ago
  web is not moving forward. It moves sideways at best, and runs in circles at worst.