5 ms·

Hasn't improved websites much? I remember the days of iframes and jquery monstrosities feigning as web "applications". The idea o a web-based office suite on th

Hasn't improved websites much? I remember the days of iframes and jquery monstrosities feigning as web "applications". The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago. My guess is you haven't actually built a real web application. The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding.

barrkel 10y ago
In 2005, I worked on a crud app framework that used data binding driven from the server and doing minimal partial updates of the web page in a way that is much more efficient both in resources and development time than anything currently mainstream. That was the second version of something that used XML islands to do data fetching before XHR was introduced by Microsoft. IMO most mainstream JS dev is just barely catching up with what smart devs were doing in individual shops.
lucozade 10y ago
Another way to look at it is that, even after 20 years and huge investment from serious companies, we can still only build poor substitutes for desktop applications. Don't get me wrong, it is amazing progress given the technology you have to fight. But in absolute terms it's not that great.
- MarkMc 10y ago
  This is my view exactly. In the past 10 years I've developed both a web app [1] and a cloud-based native app [2]. Developing the native app was by far the more enjoyable and productive experience. The great thing about native development is the long-term stability of all the components. I have access to a broad range of good-looking UI components with simple layout mechanisms, a small but robust SQL database, a rock-solid IDE and build tools - all of which haven't changed much in the past decade. Plus super-fast performance and a great range of libraries. To put it in terms of the article: the half-life of native desktop knowledge is much longer than 10 years. Almost everything I learnt about native programming 10 years ago is relevant now. Unfortunately, the atrocious deployment situation for native apps is also unchanged in 10 years (ie. "This program may harm your computer - are you really sure you want to run it?"). But on the other hand having a native app has allowed me to implement features like "offline mode" and "end-to-end encryption" that would be difficult or impossible in a web app. This has given my business a distinct advantage over web-based alternatives. [1] https://whiteboardfox.com https://whiteboardfox.com [2] https://www.solaraccounts.co.uk https://www.solaraccounts.co.uk
- gjvc 10y ago
  I really am very glad to hear someone writing in public what I've been mentioning to colleagues and all who would listen for the past few years.
raarts 10y ago
I call BS. The progress that was made in the late eighties/early nineties was much more astounding. Going from character screens to fully event driven, windowed graphics mode was a much greater and more impressive change in a shorter time-frame. the that time you had to learn a lot of new stuff in a short time too.
- dunkelheit 10y ago
  Well, in early 2000-s suddenly most of computers in the world became connected to each other and then after some time everybody got a powerful and networked computer in their pocket. I think this is pretty impressive too.
- jhall1468 10y ago
  What exactly are you calling BS on? Nothing I said conflicts with your comments at all. It's not like progress can only happen once...
khedoros1 10y ago
I've never built a web application of any description. As a user, what are the improvements that I should be looking for that have been introduced over the past 10 years? It was longer ago than that that AJAX started getting big, and as far as I can tell, that was really the last key innovation for most apps: Being able to asynchronously load data and modify the DOM when it becomes available. I'm aware of other things like video tags, webgl, canvas, and such that allow us to replace Flash for a security win, but that seems replacing a past technology just to get feature parity with what we had a decade ago. Everything else seems like stuff that makes things better for the developers but not much visible benefit to the user. I can understand where a comment about the web not being much better would come from, on the scale of a decade. Go back 20 years, and you're talking about a completely different world; frames, forms, webrings, and "Best viewed with IE 4.0". But if '96 to '06 was a series of monumental leaps, '06 to '16 looks like some tentative hops.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  There's actually a fair number of new features in the web today that you couldn't do in 2006 - offline access, push notifications, real-time communications (without a hack that breaks on most firewalls), smooth transitions, background computation, the history API, OS clipboard support, accelerometer access, geolocation access, multi-touch, etc. Few websites use them effectively yet, at least in a way that benefits the consumer (several are using them to benefit marketers). This could be because developers don't know about them, consumers don't care about them, or perhaps just not enough time has passed. XHR was introduced in 1999, after all, but it took until 2004 before anyone besides Microsoft noticed it.
  - lmb 10y ago
    My first install of Netscape Communicator had an offline mode, and one of my colleagues recent told me how they had fully working live cross-browser video conferencing in 98. Their biggest competitor was WebEx, which is still around. I think many of us underestimate what was possible to do in browsers. What has happened is that these features have been democratised: what took them months to build I can now pull of using WebRTC in the space of a weekend.
wvenable 10y ago
Browsers have improved greatly and new web development frameworks are necessary to make use of those improvements but the actual process of building usable web application doesn't seem that improved. It's certainly not any easier to achieve pretty much the same results. > The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago. What's laughable is how much effort has gone into rebuilding something in this platform with a result that is nearly the same (but worse) as what existed 20 years ago.
- jhall1468 10y ago
  20 years ago there was exactly one multiplatform office suite, and if you think StarOffice was better than the current incarnation of Google Apps I'm not sure how to respond to that outside of laughter.
  - wvenable 10y ago
    Is the web browser the best technology to achieve "multiplatform" for an office suite? It makes sense from a purely practical sense but technologically it's pretty terrible.
    - jhall1468 10y ago
      Practicality wins pretty handedly here. Technology will always improve and web based applications will become more and more feasible as a result. The flip side of that equation is that poor practical choices never improve because there will only be more platforms to target. If we made development decisions based on technological constraints alone, how is it supposed to improve?
      - mattmanser 10y ago
        I wrote pivot table functionality in XSLT and XML for IE6. Pretty much 10 years ago. It's not that you couldn't do it, it was that it wasn't worth it. Your whole multiplatform thing is disingenuous because back then there really was only 1 platform. Windows. So you've conveniently forgotten about the lotus suite, etc. I also think you're vastly overestimating how far we've come in that timespan. Like v8 was pretty much 95% of the improvements, simply because you could do more than 1000 loops in JavaScript without killing the browser. And yet today it is still harder to make a decent web app than it was in VB6 15 years ago.
indy 10y ago
Do the web based office suites use these new libraries and frameworks? (React, Angular, Webpack etc) Genuine question as I thought that companies like Google use their own in house libraries like Google Closure which have been slowly built up over many years.
- jhall1468 10y ago
  Probably not Google Apps. But Angular is a Google developed framework.
- rpeden 10y ago
  Google Apps use Closure, and after taking a peek at the source of Microsoft's online office apps, they appear to be using Script# or a similar C# to JS tool, as I see lots of references to namespaces, and lots of calls to dispose() methods. iCloud's office apps use Sproutcore, which eventually forked into Ember (though the original Sproutcore project still exists).
paganel 10y ago
> The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding. And yet "open mail in new tab" in Gmail has been dead for at least a couple of years now. In fact, I'd say that "open link in new tab" is dead on most of the new web "applications", I'm actually surprised when it works. The same goes for the "go back with backspace" thingie, which Google just killed for no good reason. Copy-paste is also starting to become a nuisance on lots of websites. sometimes when I try to do it a shitty pop-up shows up with "post this text you've just copied to FB/Twitter" or the app just re-directs me to somewhere else. It reminds me of the Flash-based websites from around 2002-2003, when they were all the rage.
- gt2 10y ago
  'Back with backspace' was changed to CMD+left-arrow assumedly because a simple backspace can change the page unexpectedly for someone who thinks they are in a text field.
  - gjvc 10y ago
    'Back with backspace' has been standard in the Windows file manager for as long as I can remember. Given that the file manager was the moral precursor to the browser of today it would have been nice to retain it. Back with backspace!
    - rejschaap 10y ago
      Actually, it didn't go back on Windows XP. After using Windows 7 for 4 years, I am still not used to this 'new' behavior.
      - gjvc 10y ago
        I sit corrected, thank you.
  - paganel 10y ago
    I know the reasons, I just think they're stupid. They've replaced one simple key-press with two non-intuitive ones. On my keyboard I have to move both my hands down in order to press the 2 keys, the backspace key was very easy to reach without moving my hands. On top of that I actually have no "CMD" key on my keyboard, I have a "Ctrl" key which I assume is the same as "CMD" (I also have a key with the Windows logo which I had assumed it was the CMD key, I was wrong). KISS has gone out of the window long ago.
venomsnake 10y ago
Have you tried to debug babelified react site with sourcemaps and whatever ... I spent four hours just to find that the latest and greatest express don't have the simple global site protection with a password (that it had in version 3) like with .htaccess - it is just not possible anymore. There were no elegant solutions. There may be some marginal progress while doing complex stuff, but doing the simple is harder and harder with each passing year. Here is a simple question - is making working UI now easier than with MFC circa 1999. If the answer is no- than that progress is imaginary. Every new thing is strongly opinionated, doesn't work and relies on magic. Debugging is nightmare and we have layers upon layers of abstractions. Please for the love of Cthulhu - if any of you googlers, facebookers, twitterers read this - next time you start doing the next big thing let these 3 be your guiding lights - the code and flow must be easy to understand, it should be easy to debug, it should be easy to pinpoint where in the code something happens - all of the frameworks' benefits become marginal at best if I have to spend 4 hours finding the exact event chain and context and place in the framework that fires that ajax request. /rant over

barrkel 10y ago

In 2005, I worked on a crud app framework that used data binding driven from the server and doing minimal partial updates of the web page in a way that is much more efficient both in resources and development time than anything currently mainstream. That was the second version of something that used XML islands to do data fetching before XHR was introduced by Microsoft. IMO most mainstream JS dev is just barely catching up with what smart devs were doing in individual shops.

lucozade 10y ago

Another way to look at it is that, even after 20 years and huge investment from serious companies, we can still only build poor substitutes for desktop applications. Don't get me wrong, it is amazing progress given the technology you have to fight. But in absolute terms it's not that great.

MarkMc 10y ago
This is my view exactly. In the past 10 years I've developed both a web app [1] and a cloud-based native app [2]. Developing the native app was by far the more enjoyable and productive experience. The great thing about native development is the long-term stability of all the components. I have access to a broad range of good-looking UI components with simple layout mechanisms, a small but robust SQL database, a rock-solid IDE and build tools - all of which haven't changed much in the past decade. Plus super-fast performance and a great range of libraries. To put it in terms of the article: the half-life of native desktop knowledge is much longer than 10 years. Almost everything I learnt about native programming 10 years ago is relevant now. Unfortunately, the atrocious deployment situation for native apps is also unchanged in 10 years (ie. "This program may harm your computer - are you really sure you want to run it?"). But on the other hand having a native app has allowed me to implement features like "offline mode" and "end-to-end encryption" that would be difficult or impossible in a web app. This has given my business a distinct advantage over web-based alternatives. [1] https://whiteboardfox.com https://whiteboardfox.com [2] https://www.solaraccounts.co.uk https://www.solaraccounts.co.uk
gjvc 10y ago
I really am very glad to hear someone writing in public what I've been mentioning to colleagues and all who would listen for the past few years.

raarts 10y ago

I call BS. The progress that was made in the late eighties/early nineties was much more astounding. Going from character screens to fully event driven, windowed graphics mode was a much greater and more impressive change in a shorter time-frame. the that time you had to learn a lot of new stuff in a short time too.

dunkelheit 10y ago
Well, in early 2000-s suddenly most of computers in the world became connected to each other and then after some time everybody got a powerful and networked computer in their pocket. I think this is pretty impressive too.
jhall1468 10y ago
What exactly are you calling BS on? Nothing I said conflicts with your comments at all. It's not like progress can only happen once...

khedoros1 10y ago

I've never built a web application of any description. As a user, what are the improvements that I should be looking for that have been introduced over the past 10 years? It was longer ago than that that AJAX started getting big, and as far as I can tell, that was really the last key innovation for most apps: Being able to asynchronously load data and modify the DOM when it becomes available. I'm aware of other things like video tags, webgl, canvas, and such that allow us to replace Flash for a security win, but that seems replacing a past technology just to get feature parity with what we had a decade ago. Everything else seems like stuff that makes things better for the developers but not much visible benefit to the user. I can understand where a comment about the web not being much better would come from, on the scale of a decade. Go back 20 years, and you're talking about a completely different world; frames, forms, webrings, and "Best viewed with IE 4.0". But if '96 to '06 was a series of monumental leaps, '06 to '16 looks like some tentative hops.

nostrademons 10y ago
There's actually a fair number of new features in the web today that you couldn't do in 2006 - offline access, push notifications, real-time communications (without a hack that breaks on most firewalls), smooth transitions, background computation, the history API, OS clipboard support, accelerometer access, geolocation access, multi-touch, etc. Few websites use them effectively yet, at least in a way that benefits the consumer (several are using them to benefit marketers). This could be because developers don't know about them, consumers don't care about them, or perhaps just not enough time has passed. XHR was introduced in 1999, after all, but it took until 2004 before anyone besides Microsoft noticed it.
- lmb 10y ago
  My first install of Netscape Communicator had an offline mode, and one of my colleagues recent told me how they had fully working live cross-browser video conferencing in 98. Their biggest competitor was WebEx, which is still around. I think many of us underestimate what was possible to do in browsers. What has happened is that these features have been democratised: what took them months to build I can now pull of using WebRTC in the space of a weekend.

wvenable 10y ago

Browsers have improved greatly and new web development frameworks are necessary to make use of those improvements but the actual process of building usable web application doesn't seem that improved. It's certainly not any easier to achieve pretty much the same results. > The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago. What's laughable is how much effort has gone into rebuilding something in this platform with a result that is nearly the same (but worse) as what existed 20 years ago.

jhall1468 10y ago
20 years ago there was exactly one multiplatform office suite, and if you think StarOffice was better than the current incarnation of Google Apps I'm not sure how to respond to that outside of laughter.
- wvenable 10y ago
  Is the web browser the best technology to achieve "multiplatform" for an office suite? It makes sense from a purely practical sense but technologically it's pretty terrible.
  - jhall1468 10y ago
    Practicality wins pretty handedly here. Technology will always improve and web based applications will become more and more feasible as a result. The flip side of that equation is that poor practical choices never improve because there will only be more platforms to target. If we made development decisions based on technological constraints alone, how is it supposed to improve?
    - mattmanser 10y ago
      I wrote pivot table functionality in XSLT and XML for IE6. Pretty much 10 years ago. It's not that you couldn't do it, it was that it wasn't worth it. Your whole multiplatform thing is disingenuous because back then there really was only 1 platform. Windows. So you've conveniently forgotten about the lotus suite, etc. I also think you're vastly overestimating how far we've come in that timespan. Like v8 was pretty much 95% of the improvements, simply because you could do more than 1000 loops in JavaScript without killing the browser. And yet today it is still harder to make a decent web app than it was in VB6 15 years ago.

indy 10y ago

Do the web based office suites use these new libraries and frameworks? (React, Angular, Webpack etc) Genuine question as I thought that companies like Google use their own in house libraries like Google Closure which have been slowly built up over many years.

jhall1468 10y ago
Probably not Google Apps. But Angular is a Google developed framework.
rpeden 10y ago
Google Apps use Closure, and after taking a peek at the source of Microsoft's online office apps, they appear to be using Script# or a similar C# to JS tool, as I see lots of references to namespaces, and lots of calls to dispose() methods. iCloud's office apps use Sproutcore, which eventually forked into Ember (though the original Sproutcore project still exists).

paganel 10y ago

> The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding. And yet "open mail in new tab" in Gmail has been dead for at least a couple of years now. In fact, I'd say that "open link in new tab" is dead on most of the new web "applications", I'm actually surprised when it works. The same goes for the "go back with backspace" thingie, which Google just killed for no good reason. Copy-paste is also starting to become a nuisance on lots of websites. sometimes when I try to do it a shitty pop-up shows up with "post this text you've just copied to FB/Twitter" or the app just re-directs me to somewhere else. It reminds me of the Flash-based websites from around 2002-2003, when they were all the rage.

gt2 10y ago
'Back with backspace' was changed to CMD+left-arrow assumedly because a simple backspace can change the page unexpectedly for someone who thinks they are in a text field.
- gjvc 10y ago
  'Back with backspace' has been standard in the Windows file manager for as long as I can remember. Given that the file manager was the moral precursor to the browser of today it would have been nice to retain it. Back with backspace!
  - rejschaap 10y ago
    Actually, it didn't go back on Windows XP. After using Windows 7 for 4 years, I am still not used to this 'new' behavior.
    - gjvc 10y ago
      I sit corrected, thank you.
- paganel 10y ago
  I know the reasons, I just think they're stupid. They've replaced one simple key-press with two non-intuitive ones. On my keyboard I have to move both my hands down in order to press the 2 keys, the backspace key was very easy to reach without moving my hands. On top of that I actually have no "CMD" key on my keyboard, I have a "Ctrl" key which I assume is the same as "CMD" (I also have a key with the Windows logo which I had assumed it was the CMD key, I was wrong). KISS has gone out of the window long ago.

venomsnake 10y ago

Have you tried to debug babelified react site with sourcemaps and whatever ... I spent four hours just to find that the latest and greatest express don't have the simple global site protection with a password (that it had in version 3) like with .htaccess - it is just not possible anymore. There were no elegant solutions. There may be some marginal progress while doing complex stuff, but doing the simple is harder and harder with each passing year. Here is a simple question - is making working UI now easier than with MFC circa 1999. If the answer is no- than that progress is imaginary. Every new thing is strongly opinionated, doesn't work and relies on magic. Debugging is nightmare and we have layers upon layers of abstractions. Please for the love of Cthulhu - if any of you googlers, facebookers, twitterers read this - next time you start doing the next big thing let these 3 be your guiding lights - the code and flow must be easy to understand, it should be easy to debug, it should be easy to pinpoint where in the code something happens - all of the frameworks' benefits become marginal at best if I have to spend 4 hours finding the exact event chain and context and place in the framework that fires that ajax request. /rant over