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Everything you've mentioned completely misses the point - it is not just performance that stinks, it is not just javascript as a language that stinks - all thes

Everything you've mentioned completely misses the point - it is not just performance that stinks, it is not just javascript as a language that stinks - all these tools are incremental improvements that completely lack imagination. It is the platform itself - meant to display static text content, being coerced into some frankenstein that requires never-ending libraries and tooling to do what desktop apps did 20 years ago. It is hard to see any other world, so let me link you to a guy to whom it was obvious the web browsers stink decades ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

icebraining 9y ago
I didn't miss the point, but I may have bungled mine. Let me start by addressing Xanadu; you obviously get the web's folly, so I don't understand why you'd link to a criticism of the web that has been outdated for twenty years. Yes, as you point out, the web is a pile of hacks, but those hacks haven't been bolted on to add two-way links or transclusions, but - as you point out - to do what desktop apps do. Had Xanadu won over the web, someone would have created JavaScript and a bunch of hacks on top of that just the same. A closer vision to what we've been trying to achieve is Alan Kay's, which said that browsers should have been essentially a basic layer - not an application - to run third-party code safely. And in my opinion, webassembly and canvas+webgl are essentially that - a simple bytecode VM and two slim layers over core graphic APIs. Sure, you need some HTML to load them for historical reasons (although surely a "manifest" file format would rapidly arise to replace it), but they are essentially standalone and quite basic. All the layers of hacks are in HTML's advanced features, in CSS and in JS. Once you have applications that don't use those, you can build a browser which is just a very basic HTML parser tied to a bytecode VM.

icebraining 9y ago

I didn't miss the point, but I may have bungled mine. Let me start by addressing Xanadu; you obviously get the web's folly, so I don't understand why you'd link to a criticism of the web that has been outdated for twenty years. Yes, as you point out, the web is a pile of hacks, but those hacks haven't been bolted on to add two-way links or transclusions, but - as you point out - to do what desktop apps do. Had Xanadu won over the web, someone would have created JavaScript and a bunch of hacks on top of that just the same. A closer vision to what we've been trying to achieve is Alan Kay's, which said that browsers should have been essentially a basic layer - not an application - to run third-party code safely. And in my opinion, webassembly and canvas+webgl are essentially that - a simple bytecode VM and two slim layers over core graphic APIs. Sure, you need some HTML to load them for historical reasons (although surely a "manifest" file format would rapidly arise to replace it), but they are essentially standalone and quite basic. All the layers of hacks are in HTML's advanced features, in CSS and in JS. Once you have applications that don't use those, you can build a browser which is just a very basic HTML parser tied to a bytecode VM.