4 ms·

It is terrible though. It is worth stating the obvious fact once in a while. This organic design of the web stack with layer upon layer upon layer upon layer c

It is terrible though. It is worth stating the obvious fact once in a while. This organic design of the web stack with layer upon layer upon layer upon layer can't go on for forever. At some point it will just become too painful and an alternative will emerge.

firasd 9y ago
The web platform has its virtues though. I can still load a webpage made in 1996 and at least read the text if nothing else; we can't say the same of erstwhile competitors like Flash, Silverlight, Java applets...
- johansch 9y ago
  Open standards tend to win/survive...
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Perhaps. but try loading various present day pages without JS enabled. Many of produce just a white screen unless you turn on JS for 3+ external domains to the one you are trying to read. And once those load, you often find half the screen filled with persistent headers and footers. In effect Flash didn't go way, it was just turn into JS+CSS. And in large part i fear we get this because the people in charge are hell bent on recreating printed media in electronic form.
  - firasd 9y ago
    The JS just fetches the text over the network and transforms it though. The browser still renders HTML markup in the end. I agree with the rest of what you said but those are just design decisions. My point was that, regardless of the code headaches, the platform itself (HTML, CSS, JS) is an incredibly flexible and resilient system.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > And in large part i fear we get this because the people in charge are hell bent on recreating printed media in electronic form. I agree. I see the conflict between designers and users to be one of the primary reasons for the current state of the web. The conflict is about who gets to control how the content looks. The web was intended for users to have that control. The browser is your "user agent", you get to decide what and how gets fetched and displayed. The designers, on the other hand, want to treat webpages as color magazines - they want to have full control over what's shown on your screen, as for them the form is just as important as the actual content. They would happily serve you the web page as a PDF, if they could get away with it. Personally, I'm firmly in the "user gets to control" camp, but the market prefers the "designers get to control" camp. So here we are, with web browsers continuously removing the ability to control anything, and the HTML/CSS accruing more and more layout control tools.
- dTal 9y ago
  "Can still read text 20 years later" is a pretty low bar. What are the odds the javascript will work?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

firasd 9y ago

The web platform has its virtues though. I can still load a webpage made in 1996 and at least read the text if nothing else; we can't say the same of erstwhile competitors like Flash, Silverlight, Java applets...

johansch 9y ago
Open standards tend to win/survive...
digi_owl 9y ago
Perhaps. but try loading various present day pages without JS enabled. Many of produce just a white screen unless you turn on JS for 3+ external domains to the one you are trying to read. And once those load, you often find half the screen filled with persistent headers and footers. In effect Flash didn't go way, it was just turn into JS+CSS. And in large part i fear we get this because the people in charge are hell bent on recreating printed media in electronic form.
- firasd 9y ago
  The JS just fetches the text over the network and transforms it though. The browser still renders HTML markup in the end. I agree with the rest of what you said but those are just design decisions. My point was that, regardless of the code headaches, the platform itself (HTML, CSS, JS) is an incredibly flexible and resilient system.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > And in large part i fear we get this because the people in charge are hell bent on recreating printed media in electronic form. I agree. I see the conflict between designers and users to be one of the primary reasons for the current state of the web. The conflict is about who gets to control how the content looks. The web was intended for users to have that control. The browser is your "user agent", you get to decide what and how gets fetched and displayed. The designers, on the other hand, want to treat webpages as color magazines - they want to have full control over what's shown on your screen, as for them the form is just as important as the actual content. They would happily serve you the web page as a PDF, if they could get away with it. Personally, I'm firmly in the "user gets to control" camp, but the market prefers the "designers get to control" camp. So here we are, with web browsers continuously removing the ability to control anything, and the HTML/CSS accruing more and more layout control tools.
dTal 9y ago
"Can still read text 20 years later" is a pretty low bar. What are the odds the javascript will work?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]