4 ms·

You're talking about "progressive enhancement". It's a romantic idea, but it never happened, probably because it's too hard and the cost is not justified given

You're talking about "progressive enhancement". It's a romantic idea, but it never happened, probably because it's too hard and the cost is not justified given most users run with their browser's default settings. The precursor of the web made by Tim Berners-Lee dates back to 1980, but it was not based on HTML or HTTP. These happened later in 1990 and early 1991. But then CSS happened in 1994. And Javascript happened in 1995 at Netscape, but then Javascript was completely useless until Microsoft came up with the iframe tag in 1996 and then with XMLHttpRequest in 1999, which was later adopted by Mozilla, Safari and Opera. And people still couldn't grasp its potential until Google delivered Gmail in 2004 and Google Maps in 2005. Not sure what the "the web was meant to be", we should ask Tim Berners-Lee sometimes, but in my opinion the web has been and is whatever its developers and users wanted it to be, with contributions from multiple parties such as Netscape, Microsoft, Mozilla, KDE/KHTML, Apple, Google and many other contributors, being a constantly evolving platform.

ams6110 11y ago
It was Microsoft with Outlook Web Access that really was the first big example of what was possible. I worked with several folks around that time and we were doing "rich" web apps in IE5 with XML data delivered from the server via xmlhttp and building the presentation in the browser with XSLT. It was really slick, especially at the time, to be able to filter and sort, do summary and detail views, etc. all without a page refresh.
jacquesm 11y ago
CSS happened in 1996, the first couple of years of the web we had no CSS, all styling was done with inline attributes up to that point. The frustrating bit is that CSS was supposed to separate content/structure and markup, but now we have pages without content but with markup where the content is loaded after the fact. This really overshot the mark.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Also note tat the separation of content and structure is mostly nonexistent as it's currently practiced. People like to talk about it as a Golden Rule, a holy virtue, and then proceed to write even worse code than they did with tables. Generally, if you find yourself writing a tangled mess of divs in order to support CSS tricks, you're not really separating content from the structure. HTML5 semantic tags helped a little, but I still rarely see them used live. (I'm not really convinced that separation of form and content is a feasible goal anyway - some elements of form are also content at the same time - but it's still a good goal to have.) > now we have pages without content but with markup where the content is loaded after the fact This is absolutely ridiculous and it, combined with the idea of routing everything through the cloud in IoT / home automation applications, makes me wonder what happened to some good old-fashioned engineering sanity. It's like people are trying to create wasteful and insecure systems on purpose. ("And what would that purpose be," - the cynic in me asks - "maybe monetizing people's data?").
  - spion 11y ago
    Have you considered that there may be an actual reason why people write a tangled mess of divs. Could it be because the entire model is crappy and people don't know what to do to make it show things the way they (or their client) want(s)?
    - talmand 11y ago
      In my experience, as a front-end developer, the usual reason I need a mess of divs and spans is to support a design that's not a good idea for a web page to begin with.
      - spion 11y ago
        What is a web page, and why would a particular design not be a good idea for it? If a web page is not a good idea, then what other technology should be used to achieve that design, as well as remain equally easy to distribute? This mindset is precisely why native mobile applications continue to exist on the market, and why articles like this one fail to convince me. Nobody (except perhaps Facebook with React) tries to really fix the web to meet the demands its been given. Instead everyone insists that the demands should change to meet the original vision and limitations of the web. Regarding the HTML/CSS interplay, flexbox gives me some new hope that reconciliation is possible (getting both semantic markup and powerful / precise styling).
        talmand 11y ago
        It's easy to find designs that are bad ideas for web pages. The most obvious culprit is a design that's excellent for a magazine layout. Such designs typically don't take into account the document flow nor the idea that different people open their browsers to different resolutions and browser window sizes. Heck, some won't even take into account different browsers with different capabilities. I think I understand where you're going with the "what is a web page?" bit, but it doesn't necessarily apply. Especially since a web page can be whatever anyone wants within the limitations of a browser, but that doesn't mean a design works based on some person's idea of what they think a web page is. In most cases a design is limited by the browser, not necessarily by the code of the page. I have no idea what you mean by your second sentence. And then, are you referring to my mindset or some other mindset? Because I fail to see how you can know my mindset on the matter. If it's the other, I would agree. Except I would say that "fixing" something in terms of making it do something it wasn't intended in the first place may possibly create more problems than we are attempting to fix. I would suggest attempting new things to see if they work, which there are some doing just that. I would point out that flexbox is an example of this. I'm excited with flexbox and have started pushing to make use of it more often, when warranted. It's hard to switch current code to it, but I think it's worth it. But, in the end, someone will eventually start complaining about its limitations and that it needs to be "fixed". Then we'll be back where we started, it's inevitable.
initself 11y ago
The web is whatever we want it to be, but sad that lack of agreement on standards and openness of platforms severely limits what it can be now without a massive sea change. Because collective agreements tend towards entropy, those with the power in the agreements hold on tight to prevent decline. When we become more conservative and restrictive in order to keep collectives in place (open web >> Facebook), it limits our freedom to innovate and development becomes "a fight to maintain" that benefits the few rather than "a forward thinking step-by-step process" that benefits more and more people.
pdkl95 11y ago
> it's too hard It's only hard if you want it to be hard. Your tools should be handling most of it for you. If they don't, pick tools that aren't broken or badly designed. When I was writing websites in Rails 2.x, progressive enhancement was usually automatic (same views are rendered as a page or a dynamically-loaded partial). Saying "It's hard because I want to write over-complicated pages with badly designed tools" isn't good engineering or good design. > most users run with their browser's default settings How, exactly, do you know this? If the answer is "analytics", you are missing an increasing amount of data. > constantly evolving platform Which is why you progressively enhance pages. Those of us that disable javascript for safety usually get blamed when this topic is brought up, but the main reason for progressive enhancement is that it's defense in depth. You don't know what the browser is, what options it has set, what bugs it may or may not have, or if extra page assets even made it successfully over the network. Not bothering with progressive enhancement is shoddy programming for much the same reason you shouldn't skip the test for NULL after calling fopen(3). edit: grammar
- Joeri 11y ago
  I don't know a single person IRL who turns off javascript. It's the browsing equivalent of running only RMS-approved software, possible in theory, but not very practical, and definitely rare. The business needs of modern commercial websites are hard to build with progressive enhancement, and web apps basically require javascript to deliver a good user experience. Yes, you can build a personal website using progressive enhancement, and at one point I did, but I had to give up my progressive enhancement ways when i became a professional web dev because it was just not practical to do otherwise.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Web apps can be excused, but most web sites? Not really. What exactly happened that made it not practical to write simple sites? Did browsers suddenly stop rendering HTML unless you generate it in JavaScript? It's not business needs, it's cargo-cult web development. Going with the latest trends without a moment to stop whether it makes sense or is actually what the users want.

ams6110 11y ago

It was Microsoft with Outlook Web Access that really was the first big example of what was possible. I worked with several folks around that time and we were doing "rich" web apps in IE5 with XML data delivered from the server via xmlhttp and building the presentation in the browser with XSLT. It was really slick, especially at the time, to be able to filter and sort, do summary and detail views, etc. all without a page refresh.

jacquesm 11y ago

CSS happened in 1996, the first couple of years of the web we had no CSS, all styling was done with inline attributes up to that point. The frustrating bit is that CSS was supposed to separate content/structure and markup, but now we have pages without content but with markup where the content is loaded after the fact. This really overshot the mark.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Also note tat the separation of content and structure is mostly nonexistent as it's currently practiced. People like to talk about it as a Golden Rule, a holy virtue, and then proceed to write even worse code than they did with tables. Generally, if you find yourself writing a tangled mess of divs in order to support CSS tricks, you're not really separating content from the structure. HTML5 semantic tags helped a little, but I still rarely see them used live. (I'm not really convinced that separation of form and content is a feasible goal anyway - some elements of form are also content at the same time - but it's still a good goal to have.) > now we have pages without content but with markup where the content is loaded after the fact This is absolutely ridiculous and it, combined with the idea of routing everything through the cloud in IoT / home automation applications, makes me wonder what happened to some good old-fashioned engineering sanity. It's like people are trying to create wasteful and insecure systems on purpose. ("And what would that purpose be," - the cynic in me asks - "maybe monetizing people's data?").
- spion 11y ago
  Have you considered that there may be an actual reason why people write a tangled mess of divs. Could it be because the entire model is crappy and people don't know what to do to make it show things the way they (or their client) want(s)?
  - talmand 11y ago
    In my experience, as a front-end developer, the usual reason I need a mess of divs and spans is to support a design that's not a good idea for a web page to begin with.
    - spion 11y ago
      What is a web page, and why would a particular design not be a good idea for it? If a web page is not a good idea, then what other technology should be used to achieve that design, as well as remain equally easy to distribute? This mindset is precisely why native mobile applications continue to exist on the market, and why articles like this one fail to convince me. Nobody (except perhaps Facebook with React) tries to really fix the web to meet the demands its been given. Instead everyone insists that the demands should change to meet the original vision and limitations of the web. Regarding the HTML/CSS interplay, flexbox gives me some new hope that reconciliation is possible (getting both semantic markup and powerful / precise styling).
      - talmand 11y ago
        It's easy to find designs that are bad ideas for web pages. The most obvious culprit is a design that's excellent for a magazine layout. Such designs typically don't take into account the document flow nor the idea that different people open their browsers to different resolutions and browser window sizes. Heck, some won't even take into account different browsers with different capabilities. I think I understand where you're going with the "what is a web page?" bit, but it doesn't necessarily apply. Especially since a web page can be whatever anyone wants within the limitations of a browser, but that doesn't mean a design works based on some person's idea of what they think a web page is. In most cases a design is limited by the browser, not necessarily by the code of the page. I have no idea what you mean by your second sentence. And then, are you referring to my mindset or some other mindset? Because I fail to see how you can know my mindset on the matter. If it's the other, I would agree. Except I would say that "fixing" something in terms of making it do something it wasn't intended in the first place may possibly create more problems than we are attempting to fix. I would suggest attempting new things to see if they work, which there are some doing just that. I would point out that flexbox is an example of this. I'm excited with flexbox and have started pushing to make use of it more often, when warranted. It's hard to switch current code to it, but I think it's worth it. But, in the end, someone will eventually start complaining about its limitations and that it needs to be "fixed". Then we'll be back where we started, it's inevitable.

initself 11y ago

The web is whatever we want it to be, but sad that lack of agreement on standards and openness of platforms severely limits what it can be now without a massive sea change. Because collective agreements tend towards entropy, those with the power in the agreements hold on tight to prevent decline. When we become more conservative and restrictive in order to keep collectives in place (open web >> Facebook), it limits our freedom to innovate and development becomes "a fight to maintain" that benefits the few rather than "a forward thinking step-by-step process" that benefits more and more people.

pdkl95 11y ago

> it's too hard It's only hard if you want it to be hard. Your tools should be handling most of it for you. If they don't, pick tools that aren't broken or badly designed. When I was writing websites in Rails 2.x, progressive enhancement was usually automatic (same views are rendered as a page or a dynamically-loaded partial). Saying "It's hard because I want to write over-complicated pages with badly designed tools" isn't good engineering or good design. > most users run with their browser's default settings How, exactly, do you know this? If the answer is "analytics", you are missing an increasing amount of data. > constantly evolving platform Which is why you progressively enhance pages. Those of us that disable javascript for safety usually get blamed when this topic is brought up, but the main reason for progressive enhancement is that it's defense in depth. You don't know what the browser is, what options it has set, what bugs it may or may not have, or if extra page assets even made it successfully over the network. Not bothering with progressive enhancement is shoddy programming for much the same reason you shouldn't skip the test for NULL after calling fopen(3). edit: grammar

Joeri 11y ago
I don't know a single person IRL who turns off javascript. It's the browsing equivalent of running only RMS-approved software, possible in theory, but not very practical, and definitely rare. The business needs of modern commercial websites are hard to build with progressive enhancement, and web apps basically require javascript to deliver a good user experience. Yes, you can build a personal website using progressive enhancement, and at one point I did, but I had to give up my progressive enhancement ways when i became a professional web dev because it was just not practical to do otherwise.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Web apps can be excused, but most web sites? Not really. What exactly happened that made it not practical to write simple sites? Did browsers suddenly stop rendering HTML unless you generate it in JavaScript? It's not business needs, it's cargo-cult web development. Going with the latest trends without a moment to stop whether it makes sense or is actually what the users want.