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Because continued development of the Web is an obvious, user-hostile money-grab. If you only care about getting your software to users, you have a million choic

by gue5t 10y ago

Because continued development of the Web is an obvious, user-hostile money-grab. If you only care about getting your software to users, you have a million choices for your application runtime. If you want to monetize every user by selling their privacy or headspace, you have only one: i.e., "pirating" Facebook is a logical impossibility. Communicative efficacy on the Web has not improved since the early 1990s--Javascript and its ilk have virtually no positive effect on the usefulness of Wikipedia, for example. We're converting what was intended to be a transport for communication into a framework for writing portable software. The thesis here is that there should be a digital way to share hypertext articles and other statically-described communication without pay the costs (privacy, rendering efficiency, security bugs, transport performance and uncacheability, accessibility) associated with a cross-platform sandboxed multimedia software runtime.

usaphp 10y ago
Weren't computers built at first to do completely different from what we are currently using them for? I don't get the negativity about new ways people try to use things we have. If we were always following guidelines and rules, we would be stuck in the past
- Bromskloss 10y ago
  It's not "being new" that is the criticised activity here.
- parennoob 10y ago
  Similarly, if we were never negative about things that sucked from our perspective, we would be stuck in a world where Internet Explorer was the only browser and everyone was using "Windows 2016". Negative feedback (preferably with suggestions for improvement) is just as important as imaginative new ways of using the web.
- gue5t 10y ago
  I don't want to be rude, but I really don't understand your message. Computers have always been, and will always be, tools for automating away work. The specific nature of the work the user needs automated is in a constant state of flux. One particular kind of work that we've wanted computers to do for us since the 20th century is the sharing of written and visual information. Ostensibly, this is what the Web was written for, and though it wasn't perfect, it could have evolved into a simply, highly efficient tool for this purpose. Instead, it can be seen evolving into a sandboxed application runtime, a workload with vastly different properties. Good implementations of software for these two workloads would share little structure outside of that required for inevitable hardware access. Evolving the Web into an application runtime is possible, and well underway, but doing so still leaves the niche of software for an unfettered global commons of knowledge unfilled. By using the Web we're building for the latter purpose, we are met with drawbacks which include (as I mentioned): - lack of privacy - rendering efficiency - security bugs and malware - transport performance - uncacheability - accessibility We can attempt to address each of these piecemeal, and with sustained effort we're likely to make good progress on most of them, in due time. But a lot of these are really hard problems for an application runtime to solve. Conversely, these problems are a lot easier (where they exist at all) on a software platform designed from the ground up for hypertext-based, archivable communication, rather than as an application runtime.
  - wtbob 10y ago
    This is possibly the absolute best comment I've read in months. It puts into words why I dislike JavaScript 'web apps' so much: the Web was this really neat tool for sharing the written word, and it's turned into a virtual machine runtime. I don't mind the VM, but it's a hack, and I miss the tool for sharing information.
  - mikro2nd 10y ago
    And isn't it funny how many of those problems were reasonably well addressed (not all, not perfectly, but mostly better than current state-of-art) by a software platform designed from the ground up to be a sandboxed application runtime back in the 1990's... Java something something.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Nobody is complaining about people playing around and inventing new stuff. That's the hacking spirit, that's the essence of progress. I like browser experiments just like everyone else, even if half of them lock my computer up. No, we're complaining about those inventing new ways to make people's life much worse in exchance for the off chance that someone leaves them more money.

by gue5t 10y ago

usaphp 10y ago

Weren't computers built at first to do completely different from what we are currently using them for? I don't get the negativity about new ways people try to use things we have. If we were always following guidelines and rules, we would be stuck in the past

Bromskloss 10y ago
It's not "being new" that is the criticised activity here.
parennoob 10y ago
Similarly, if we were never negative about things that sucked from our perspective, we would be stuck in a world where Internet Explorer was the only browser and everyone was using "Windows 2016". Negative feedback (preferably with suggestions for improvement) is just as important as imaginative new ways of using the web.
gue5t 10y ago
I don't want to be rude, but I really don't understand your message. Computers have always been, and will always be, tools for automating away work. The specific nature of the work the user needs automated is in a constant state of flux. One particular kind of work that we've wanted computers to do for us since the 20th century is the sharing of written and visual information. Ostensibly, this is what the Web was written for, and though it wasn't perfect, it could have evolved into a simply, highly efficient tool for this purpose. Instead, it can be seen evolving into a sandboxed application runtime, a workload with vastly different properties. Good implementations of software for these two workloads would share little structure outside of that required for inevitable hardware access. Evolving the Web into an application runtime is possible, and well underway, but doing so still leaves the niche of software for an unfettered global commons of knowledge unfilled. By using the Web we're building for the latter purpose, we are met with drawbacks which include (as I mentioned): - lack of privacy - rendering efficiency - security bugs and malware - transport performance - uncacheability - accessibility We can attempt to address each of these piecemeal, and with sustained effort we're likely to make good progress on most of them, in due time. But a lot of these are really hard problems for an application runtime to solve. Conversely, these problems are a lot easier (where they exist at all) on a software platform designed from the ground up for hypertext-based, archivable communication, rather than as an application runtime.
- wtbob 10y ago
  This is possibly the absolute best comment I've read in months. It puts into words why I dislike JavaScript 'web apps' so much: the Web was this really neat tool for sharing the written word, and it's turned into a virtual machine runtime. I don't mind the VM, but it's a hack, and I miss the tool for sharing information.
- mikro2nd 10y ago
  And isn't it funny how many of those problems were reasonably well addressed (not all, not perfectly, but mostly better than current state-of-art) by a software platform designed from the ground up to be a sandboxed application runtime back in the 1990's... Java something something.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Nobody is complaining about people playing around and inventing new stuff. That's the hacking spirit, that's the essence of progress. I like browser experiments just like everyone else, even if half of them lock my computer up. No, we're complaining about those inventing new ways to make people's life much worse in exchance for the off chance that someone leaves them more money.