5 ms·

* lowest barrier to entry of any platform * View Source of anything * development tools that keep improving by the day * non-proprietary, open standards * c

* lowest barrier to entry of any platform * View Source of anything * development tools that keep improving by the day * non-proprietary, open standards * completely sandboxed from host environment * runs anywhere * first-class GUI support The list goes on...

otakucode 9y ago
Right... when was the last time you USED View Source on something done in JS and actually used on a production site? Sandboxing from the environment also has its upsides and its downsides. What people actually want applications to DO is deal with their information. And sandboxing the host means they lose any semblance of control over that data, leading to it getting monitored, mined, etc. And it doesn't solve any of the actual problems. It just changes the target while simultaneously making those targets SO much juicier. Want the personal info of 143 million Americans? Hack the web app of a credit company, no need to hunt down and break into 143 million different machines! And the users won't even know if the data was stolen unless a company volunteers the information! Sometimes they even do! I really, really have to wonder about "first-class GUI support". Prior to the web applications used standard UI controls. Because that makes sense and makes computers easy to use. The web brought 'every single UI is different', which is horrendous. And when you can manage to put together a UI with web tech, then it's trapped in the browser. Which actively goes out of its way to make it as difficult as possible to manage running several different things at once. I think the answer to the webs success boils down to delivering what users actually want. Despite all the other warts, its valuable enough to convince them to not care. They want to search for something they want, vaguely, and be using an application one second later. All other considerations be damned. They'll wrestle with confusing UIs that change all the time without warning. They'll accept not having a lick of control over their data. They'll deal with being aggressively advertised to and companies trying to hound them into subscriptions because the 'service' of working around the sandboxing by keeping their data together needs ongoing cash infusions when the user only wanted a single product they could use for long periods of time. Like if people who made hammers started making ones that would only work with nails gotten from the hammer manufacturer and they didn't permit you to get enough to last, requiring a subscription so they could sell the information about what kind of nails and how often you were using them to a nail company.
- celim307 9y ago
  > when was the last time you USED View Source on something done in JS and actually used on a production site I don't disagree with most of your post but I am confused why you brought this up as a point of contention. Viewing source is pretty common?
  - tene 9y ago
    My understanding of this argument, as best as I'm able to state it, is approximately: Claims that view-source is a significant virtue of the web are nostalgic and misguided, as demonstrated by the fact that it's difficult and rare today to find anything usable or valuable by reading the javascript source of major websites like facebook, especially by amateurs. It's possible that I've misunderstood some nuances about the claim, and I apologize if I've misrepresented the comment you're replying to.
    - jonnyscholes 9y ago
      Sure large sites with extraordinarily valuable IP make it hard to view source and learn anything. However other smaller sites are a wealth of wisdom. Just the other day for example I inspected the new KIKK website to see how they managed to keep their website silky smooth on mobile whilst cramming quite a few transitions/animations in. And for that matter I learned a heap inspecting (whilst attempting to reverse) Google's culture project. Specifically how they protected their image assets using a novel technique (since this was in pre-web-DRM world). The other thing is as sites know their code is in the open I suspect it's easier for devs to get internal approval to do write ups of particular techniques.
    - olavk 9y ago
      The discussion was about why the web became a successful platform in the first place. There is no doubt "view-source" was a very significant factor in this. This is basically how the first generation of web devs learned the craft.
- MaulingMonkey 9y ago
  > Right... when was the last time you USED View Source on something done in JS and actually used on a production site? I tweaked Discord's scrollback limit a few times by hunting down the appropriate constant, setting a breakpoint where it was used, and modifying the value then, to make it work better on my portrait 4k monitors. Couldn't be bothered to proxy the javascript (or otherwise do something persistent to modify the JS) to make the change stick though. Something I did make stick was the removal of "Blocked Message" notifications which I use to filter out particularly noisy bots in poorly moderated channels. That's certainly been within the past few months. I've got javascriptlets which, while not dependent on the actual source of a website, will speed up HTML5 video to 2/3/4x speed. Past year or so? I wrote a browser extension that abused the Trello DOM for a bunch of minor UI things and added some nifty time tracking stuff. A few years ago now, admittedly. Oh sure, the minified sources are terrible to parse through these days, but it's still an option. Meanwhile, I still can't deal with x86 disassembly fluidly enough to reasonably modify other people's programs, despite staring at such disassembly for longer...

otakucode 9y ago

Right... when was the last time you USED View Source on something done in JS and actually used on a production site? Sandboxing from the environment also has its upsides and its downsides. What people actually want applications to DO is deal with their information. And sandboxing the host means they lose any semblance of control over that data, leading to it getting monitored, mined, etc. And it doesn't solve any of the actual problems. It just changes the target while simultaneously making those targets SO much juicier. Want the personal info of 143 million Americans? Hack the web app of a credit company, no need to hunt down and break into 143 million different machines! And the users won't even know if the data was stolen unless a company volunteers the information! Sometimes they even do! I really, really have to wonder about "first-class GUI support". Prior to the web applications used standard UI controls. Because that makes sense and makes computers easy to use. The web brought 'every single UI is different', which is horrendous. And when you can manage to put together a UI with web tech, then it's trapped in the browser. Which actively goes out of its way to make it as difficult as possible to manage running several different things at once. I think the answer to the webs success boils down to delivering what users actually want. Despite all the other warts, its valuable enough to convince them to not care. They want to search for something they want, vaguely, and be using an application one second later. All other considerations be damned. They'll wrestle with confusing UIs that change all the time without warning. They'll accept not having a lick of control over their data. They'll deal with being aggressively advertised to and companies trying to hound them into subscriptions because the 'service' of working around the sandboxing by keeping their data together needs ongoing cash infusions when the user only wanted a single product they could use for long periods of time. Like if people who made hammers started making ones that would only work with nails gotten from the hammer manufacturer and they didn't permit you to get enough to last, requiring a subscription so they could sell the information about what kind of nails and how often you were using them to a nail company.

celim307 9y ago
> when was the last time you USED View Source on something done in JS and actually used on a production site I don't disagree with most of your post but I am confused why you brought this up as a point of contention. Viewing source is pretty common?
- tene 9y ago
  My understanding of this argument, as best as I'm able to state it, is approximately: Claims that view-source is a significant virtue of the web are nostalgic and misguided, as demonstrated by the fact that it's difficult and rare today to find anything usable or valuable by reading the javascript source of major websites like facebook, especially by amateurs. It's possible that I've misunderstood some nuances about the claim, and I apologize if I've misrepresented the comment you're replying to.
  - jonnyscholes 9y ago
    Sure large sites with extraordinarily valuable IP make it hard to view source and learn anything. However other smaller sites are a wealth of wisdom. Just the other day for example I inspected the new KIKK website to see how they managed to keep their website silky smooth on mobile whilst cramming quite a few transitions/animations in. And for that matter I learned a heap inspecting (whilst attempting to reverse) Google's culture project. Specifically how they protected their image assets using a novel technique (since this was in pre-web-DRM world). The other thing is as sites know their code is in the open I suspect it's easier for devs to get internal approval to do write ups of particular techniques.
  - olavk 9y ago
    The discussion was about why the web became a successful platform in the first place. There is no doubt "view-source" was a very significant factor in this. This is basically how the first generation of web devs learned the craft.
MaulingMonkey 9y ago
> Right... when was the last time you USED View Source on something done in JS and actually used on a production site? I tweaked Discord's scrollback limit a few times by hunting down the appropriate constant, setting a breakpoint where it was used, and modifying the value then, to make it work better on my portrait 4k monitors. Couldn't be bothered to proxy the javascript (or otherwise do something persistent to modify the JS) to make the change stick though. Something I did make stick was the removal of "Blocked Message" notifications which I use to filter out particularly noisy bots in poorly moderated channels. That's certainly been within the past few months. I've got javascriptlets which, while not dependent on the actual source of a website, will speed up HTML5 video to 2/3/4x speed. Past year or so? I wrote a browser extension that abused the Trello DOM for a bunch of minor UI things and added some nifty time tracking stuff. A few years ago now, admittedly. Oh sure, the minified sources are terrible to parse through these days, but it's still an option. Meanwhile, I still can't deal with x86 disassembly fluidly enough to reasonably modify other people's programs, despite staring at such disassembly for longer...