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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 specif
by 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 agoThis 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 agoAnd 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.