6 ms·

Honestly curious, why is it a delusion to want the WWW to be a more powerful platform that offers more than just being a web of shared documents? Why is it bad

by crysin 9y ago

Honestly curious, why is it a delusion to want the WWW to be a more powerful platform that offers more than just being a web of shared documents? Why is it bad for there to be an array of purposes or applications available on the Web? Just because you don't see value in it, doesn't really make it fair to call others who do see value in it delusional.

wtallis 9y ago
The WWW started out as a document sharing platform, and that has proven repeatedly to be a horrible base upon which to build an application platform. There's technological ugliness in the form of kludges like WebAssembly and WebSockets and WebGL that are (badly) re-inventing large parts of the operating system. There's the usability nightmares caused by trying to make a web application imitate a native UI (or worse, trying to use web technologies locally as a UI toolkit a la Electron). The addition of application-oriented features has detracted from the original feature set: gratuitous overuse of JS for stuff that can be done in CSS and HTML is rampant, leading to less responsive sites with worse accessibility and worse battery life. And sooner or later, every attempt to shoehorn a real security model onto the Web has fallen. Every month, the idea of a secure sandbox for running untrusted third-party code looks more and more like a pipe dream. I fully understand how much the world has invested in making the web into an applications platform, and I recognize that many things of value have been built on that platform. But it's been a fundamentally flawed enterprise from the start, and the pitfalls are getting harder to ignore. We need to start taking seriously again the idea that untrusted code cannot be trusted. We need to stop re-inventing the operating system within the browser just because some programmers are too lazy to port their applications to more than one OS even when there are libraries to abstract away all the differences that don't require a UI redesign. We need to stop sacrificing so much efficiency for the sake of portability that doesn't live up to its purpose. In order for a web browser suitable for document-oriented usage with limited interactivity to be secure and offer reasonable protections for your privacy, it has to take measures that preclude it from being a good applications platform. That conflict seems irreconcilable.
- not_kurt_godel 9y ago
  There are myriad reasons beyond programmers being "too lazy" to port applications to more than one OS for the web evolving into an application platform. Your rant is on par with suggesting we go back to horses and buggies because high-speed car accidents can be deadly. It vastly overstates the danger posed by JS specifically, completely discounts its superiority in filling the niche that it does compared to the previous status quo, and advocates a non-sequitur, anachronistic resolution.
  - wtallis 9y ago
    > Your rant is on par with suggesting we go back to horses and buggies because high-speed car accidents can be deadly. Don't be ridiculous. I'm not saying we shouldn't have cross-platform apps at all. I'm just saying we need a clear distinction between the WWW and any applications platform, just like we need a clear distinction between sidewalks and freeways. The web browser cannot do both jobs well.
    - krapp 9y ago
      > I'm just saying we need a clear distinction between the WWW and any applications platform, just like we need a clear distinction between sidewalks and freeways. One problem is, no one seems to be able to define "web application" in a way that makes the distinction clear. Most sites that use javascript still use it in the context of displaying documents, so if you define any site that uses javascript at all as an "application," then most sites, including Hacker News, count as applications. But that doesn't actually fix any problems.

by crysin 9y ago

wtallis 9y ago

The WWW started out as a document sharing platform, and that has proven repeatedly to be a horrible base upon which to build an application platform. There's technological ugliness in the form of kludges like WebAssembly and WebSockets and WebGL that are (badly) re-inventing large parts of the operating system. There's the usability nightmares caused by trying to make a web application imitate a native UI (or worse, trying to use web technologies locally as a UI toolkit a la Electron). The addition of application-oriented features has detracted from the original feature set: gratuitous overuse of JS for stuff that can be done in CSS and HTML is rampant, leading to less responsive sites with worse accessibility and worse battery life. And sooner or later, every attempt to shoehorn a real security model onto the Web has fallen. Every month, the idea of a secure sandbox for running untrusted third-party code looks more and more like a pipe dream. I fully understand how much the world has invested in making the web into an applications platform, and I recognize that many things of value have been built on that platform. But it's been a fundamentally flawed enterprise from the start, and the pitfalls are getting harder to ignore. We need to start taking seriously again the idea that untrusted code cannot be trusted. We need to stop re-inventing the operating system within the browser just because some programmers are too lazy to port their applications to more than one OS even when there are libraries to abstract away all the differences that don't require a UI redesign. We need to stop sacrificing so much efficiency for the sake of portability that doesn't live up to its purpose. In order for a web browser suitable for document-oriented usage with limited interactivity to be secure and offer reasonable protections for your privacy, it has to take measures that preclude it from being a good applications platform. That conflict seems irreconcilable.

not_kurt_godel 9y ago
There are myriad reasons beyond programmers being "too lazy" to port applications to more than one OS for the web evolving into an application platform. Your rant is on par with suggesting we go back to horses and buggies because high-speed car accidents can be deadly. It vastly overstates the danger posed by JS specifically, completely discounts its superiority in filling the niche that it does compared to the previous status quo, and advocates a non-sequitur, anachronistic resolution.
- wtallis 9y ago
  > Your rant is on par with suggesting we go back to horses and buggies because high-speed car accidents can be deadly. Don't be ridiculous. I'm not saying we shouldn't have cross-platform apps at all. I'm just saying we need a clear distinction between the WWW and any applications platform, just like we need a clear distinction between sidewalks and freeways. The web browser cannot do both jobs well.
  - krapp 9y ago
    > I'm just saying we need a clear distinction between the WWW and any applications platform, just like we need a clear distinction between sidewalks and freeways. One problem is, no one seems to be able to define "web application" in a way that makes the distinction clear. Most sites that use javascript still use it in the context of displaying documents, so if you define any site that uses javascript at all as an "application," then most sites, including Hacker News, count as applications. But that doesn't actually fix any problems.