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> That's why HTML failed as descriptive language I think HTML and the web failed in general. Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with

> That's why HTML failed as descriptive language I think HTML and the web failed in general. Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with a handful of span tags. We went from abusing tables to abusing the entire document. We, in effect, eliminated all semantic meaning from a document by making everything generic tag soup. The DOM + JS has largely supplanted HTML as the source of a web page. Especially when using tools such as React or Angular. In terms of vision, the rise of native phone apps and the fact that every major site has a mobile version and a separate desktop version really highlights how the web failed. I do node/React dev for a living. I'll be the first to admit this pile of hacks is total garbage. Mobile web is almost unusable. I hate it. I hate the sites I work on. Their UX is horrid. Native apps are so far superior that they make the web look like an embarrassing relic. But web development pays the bills and keeps the lights on.

pmontra 8y ago
I'm working on a project with a React frontend. I think I never tried it on my phone. It probably works but the site is really meant for the desktop and I don't know if it makes sense on a small display. However... I'm writing this on my phone so HN is part of the mobile web and it works well. I read the post on twobithistory.org on my phone and that also works well. I doubt that they have an app and even if they did, why should I install it and what would happen when I follow a link from HN to them? I'll get the mobile site or would the app catch the link and open itself? I don't even have the apps of the news sites I read most. Reading them on the phone with Firefox and uBlock is good enough. Their apps probably contain more spyware then the adblocked sites. So the mobile web did not conpletely fail. It's still what's on the screen of my phone for about 50% of the time: since last charge 3h 55m of screen time, 57m used by phone calls, 1h 54m Firefox, 15m WhatsApp, etc.
- mycall 8y ago
  > 57m used by phone calls You are an unusual smartphone user. For most people, it is 0m.
  - chickenfries 8y ago
    Do you have stats? You might be projecting.
    - pmontra 8y ago
      I checked in the Battery settings. Android 8 shows the stats there.
  - PeterisP 8y ago
    In USA, the average time spent on voice calls is something like 20 minutes per day. 60 minutes is unusual, but not that unusual. https://abcnews.go.com/WN/cell-phones-demography-nielsen-data-breaks-mobile-phone/story?id=11468925 https://abcnews.go.com/WN/cell-phones-demography-nielsen-dat... https://hackernoon.com/how-much-time-do-people-spend-on-their-mobile-phones-in-2017-e5f90a0b10a6 https://hackernoon.com/how-much-time-do-people-spend-on-thei...
Theodores 8y ago
> Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with a handful of span tags. We went from abusing tables to abusing the entire document. True but there is some reaction to this. On one hand there are people like yourself that just make the document from data and javascript using lots of build tools, frameworks and ever more specialist technologies. On the other hand there are people wanting to get back to a pure document that has next to no javascript needed, using HTML5 built-ins for forms, CSS Grid for layout, no polyfills for legacy browsers and no frameworks. This is not widely given exciting buzzwords but 'intrinsic web design' is happening. When I watch conference presentations it seems to me that there are two groups of people, those to whom the ever more complicated appeals and those to whom the make it simple appeals. The 'make it simple' currently does not fit with existing workflows, maybe for startups but not for most web agencies where a good decade has now been spent nesting divs in more divs and making it a big mess of un-maintainable 'write only' code, with 97% unused stylesheets that have got to the stage where nobody knows what anything does, they just add new hacks to it. With where we are with HTML5 it should be easy to markup your document semantically, however, Google have kind of given up with that and if you want to put some semantic goodness in there then you add some JSON-LD on the end rather than put property tags in everything throughout the document. It is as if Google would prefer the document to be doubled up, once with trillions of divs for some bad CSS and then done again to be machine readable. Regarding mobile, 'progressive web apps' is widely supported and has removed the need for custom mobile applications. This is progress.
josephg 8y ago
I've been recently wondering if there's another, better way. The big usability win of the web is that you can run applications without installing anything. Is there a way we could build a new platform that would get us the advantages of the web without all the awful cruft? I'm imagining starting with webassembly for sandboxing. We can then expose through to webassembly a useful set of API primitives from the underlying OS for text boxes, widgets and stuff. Apps would live in a heavily sandboxed container and because of that they could be launched by going to the right URL in a special browser. We could use the same security model as phone apps - apps have a special place to store their own files. They have some network access, and can access the user's data through explicit per-capability security requests. That would allow a good, secure webapp style experience for users. But the apps themselves would feel native (since they could use native UX primitives, and they would have native performance). Developers could write code in any language that can compile to webassembly. We could make a bundler that produced normal applications (by compiling the app out of the sandbox). Or we could run the application in a normal web browser if we wanted, by backing the UX primitives with DOM calls, passed through to WASM.
- dangrover 8y ago
  Didn't we try this in the 90's with Java applets?
  - josephg 8y ago
    What is the essential difference between the success of browsers and the failure of X-Windows and Java applets? For my money its that Java applets and X-Windows didn't have a distribution mechanism and security model. They simply didn't do anything I couldn't already do with desktop apps and HTML. Also, frankly, they were kind of slow and not very good. I think thats the biggest problem with this sort of idea - the breadth of surface area for GUI toolkits is crazy huge. Building something that works well, and works cross-platform is a seriously huge amount of work.
    - flukus 8y ago
      > What is the essential difference between the success of browsers and the failure of X-Windows and Java applets? Timeline is one of the key ones. According to chrome task manager (because browsers need task managers now) the page I'm typing this reply on the contains a text area and your comment is consuming 30MB of RAM. Back when Java applets were getting their reputation for being slow I would have been lucky to have a computer with 32MB of RAM, 8 and 16MB were still common at that time. Now there were some other things that made applets awful, but if they were introduced today they wouldn't seem nearly as bad as we remember, on the same computer this page would be clunky. For x-windows, it was never really a contender because there was no MS compatibility, but the potential was there.
danShumway 8y ago
When people say this, it feels like we're in different universes, or at least looking for different things. I main Linux on all of my machines. Most of the native apps on it have terrible UX. Even big apps - On touch screens, Firefox doesn't support two-fingered scroll. Chrome won't snap to the side of a desktop. Neither will bring up a virtual keyboard if I click on the URL bar. The majority of my native apps that I use don't support fractional scaling - apps like Unity3d are unusable on 13 inch screens and there's no way for me to zoom in or out on them. Even system dialogs suffer from this problem sometimes, it's like nobody on native ever learned what an 'em' unit is and they're still stuck in 1990 calculating pixel positions. To contrast, most of the websites that I'm using, even when they're badly designed will work on smallish screens or can be individually zoomed in and out. My keyboard shortcuts work pretty much the same across every site (aside from the rare exception that tries to be all fancy and implement its own). If they break, it's not rare for me to be able to open up an inspector and add one or two CSS rules that fix the problem. Reading Hacker News, I sometimes wonder if I'm just browsing/using entirely different sites/apps than everybody else is. I don't understand how my experience is so different. Regarding semantic HTML, I generally don't have too much of a problem there either. I don't think semantic HTML is hard to write - I use it on every single one of my sites. If you're using React and it can't be used without spitting divs all over the place, maybe the solution is just to stop using React? Modern HTML is only going to look like div soup if you fill it with divs. I mean, I can build you a horrible SQL database that requires 30 joins on every data call, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SQL is bad. It means that auto-generating SQL tables based on a bunch of cobbled-together frameworks and user-scripts is bad. Treat your application's DOM like you would a schema, and put some thought into it. That will also solve a great deal of the responsive design problems on mobile that people are talking about, because light DOM structures are more flexible than heavy ones.
- andybak 8y ago
  > I don't think semantic HTML is hard to write - I use it on every single one of my sites. Buzzword-compliant semantic HTML or semantically useful HTML? Is there any user-agent out there that benefits from the extra work you're putting in?
PurpleRamen 8y ago
> Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with a handful of span tags. So just add a layout-language to divide it from the content, as already done with style?
blablabla123 8y ago
Nobody is stopping people from using the relatively new article or header tags. There is not really an inherent advantage in using divs except that they are barebones maybe. Apart from that, there are data attributes which are actually used on real-world websites for annotation of texts. Indeed they go particularly well with span tags. People forget that all these fancy frameworks produce actual HTML5 DOMs, who cares if those are static or dynamic. I someone wants to write a semantic web parser/crawler then it's a great idea, but probably it shouldn't be done using wget. :-)

pmontra 8y ago

I'm working on a project with a React frontend. I think I never tried it on my phone. It probably works but the site is really meant for the desktop and I don't know if it makes sense on a small display. However... I'm writing this on my phone so HN is part of the mobile web and it works well. I read the post on twobithistory.org on my phone and that also works well. I doubt that they have an app and even if they did, why should I install it and what would happen when I follow a link from HN to them? I'll get the mobile site or would the app catch the link and open itself? I don't even have the apps of the news sites I read most. Reading them on the phone with Firefox and uBlock is good enough. Their apps probably contain more spyware then the adblocked sites. So the mobile web did not conpletely fail. It's still what's on the screen of my phone for about 50% of the time: since last charge 3h 55m of screen time, 57m used by phone calls, 1h 54m Firefox, 15m WhatsApp, etc.

mycall 8y ago
> 57m used by phone calls You are an unusual smartphone user. For most people, it is 0m.
- chickenfries 8y ago
  Do you have stats? You might be projecting.
  - pmontra 8y ago
    I checked in the Battery settings. Android 8 shows the stats there.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  In USA, the average time spent on voice calls is something like 20 minutes per day. 60 minutes is unusual, but not that unusual. https://abcnews.go.com/WN/cell-phones-demography-nielsen-data-breaks-mobile-phone/story?id=11468925 https://abcnews.go.com/WN/cell-phones-demography-nielsen-dat... https://hackernoon.com/how-much-time-do-people-spend-on-their-mobile-phones-in-2017-e5f90a0b10a6 https://hackernoon.com/how-much-time-do-people-spend-on-thei...

Theodores 8y ago

> Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with a handful of span tags. We went from abusing tables to abusing the entire document. True but there is some reaction to this. On one hand there are people like yourself that just make the document from data and javascript using lots of build tools, frameworks and ever more specialist technologies. On the other hand there are people wanting to get back to a pure document that has next to no javascript needed, using HTML5 built-ins for forms, CSS Grid for layout, no polyfills for legacy browsers and no frameworks. This is not widely given exciting buzzwords but 'intrinsic web design' is happening. When I watch conference presentations it seems to me that there are two groups of people, those to whom the ever more complicated appeals and those to whom the make it simple appeals. The 'make it simple' currently does not fit with existing workflows, maybe for startups but not for most web agencies where a good decade has now been spent nesting divs in more divs and making it a big mess of un-maintainable 'write only' code, with 97% unused stylesheets that have got to the stage where nobody knows what anything does, they just add new hacks to it. With where we are with HTML5 it should be easy to markup your document semantically, however, Google have kind of given up with that and if you want to put some semantic goodness in there then you add some JSON-LD on the end rather than put property tags in everything throughout the document. It is as if Google would prefer the document to be doubled up, once with trillions of divs for some bad CSS and then done again to be machine readable. Regarding mobile, 'progressive web apps' is widely supported and has removed the need for custom mobile applications. This is progress.

josephg 8y ago

I've been recently wondering if there's another, better way. The big usability win of the web is that you can run applications without installing anything. Is there a way we could build a new platform that would get us the advantages of the web without all the awful cruft? I'm imagining starting with webassembly for sandboxing. We can then expose through to webassembly a useful set of API primitives from the underlying OS for text boxes, widgets and stuff. Apps would live in a heavily sandboxed container and because of that they could be launched by going to the right URL in a special browser. We could use the same security model as phone apps - apps have a special place to store their own files. They have some network access, and can access the user's data through explicit per-capability security requests. That would allow a good, secure webapp style experience for users. But the apps themselves would feel native (since they could use native UX primitives, and they would have native performance). Developers could write code in any language that can compile to webassembly. We could make a bundler that produced normal applications (by compiling the app out of the sandbox). Or we could run the application in a normal web browser if we wanted, by backing the UX primitives with DOM calls, passed through to WASM.

dangrover 8y ago
Didn't we try this in the 90's with Java applets?
- josephg 8y ago
  What is the essential difference between the success of browsers and the failure of X-Windows and Java applets? For my money its that Java applets and X-Windows didn't have a distribution mechanism and security model. They simply didn't do anything I couldn't already do with desktop apps and HTML. Also, frankly, they were kind of slow and not very good. I think thats the biggest problem with this sort of idea - the breadth of surface area for GUI toolkits is crazy huge. Building something that works well, and works cross-platform is a seriously huge amount of work.
  - flukus 8y ago
    > What is the essential difference between the success of browsers and the failure of X-Windows and Java applets? Timeline is one of the key ones. According to chrome task manager (because browsers need task managers now) the page I'm typing this reply on the contains a text area and your comment is consuming 30MB of RAM. Back when Java applets were getting their reputation for being slow I would have been lucky to have a computer with 32MB of RAM, 8 and 16MB were still common at that time. Now there were some other things that made applets awful, but if they were introduced today they wouldn't seem nearly as bad as we remember, on the same computer this page would be clunky. For x-windows, it was never really a contender because there was no MS compatibility, but the potential was there.

danShumway 8y ago

When people say this, it feels like we're in different universes, or at least looking for different things. I main Linux on all of my machines. Most of the native apps on it have terrible UX. Even big apps - On touch screens, Firefox doesn't support two-fingered scroll. Chrome won't snap to the side of a desktop. Neither will bring up a virtual keyboard if I click on the URL bar. The majority of my native apps that I use don't support fractional scaling - apps like Unity3d are unusable on 13 inch screens and there's no way for me to zoom in or out on them. Even system dialogs suffer from this problem sometimes, it's like nobody on native ever learned what an 'em' unit is and they're still stuck in 1990 calculating pixel positions. To contrast, most of the websites that I'm using, even when they're badly designed will work on smallish screens or can be individually zoomed in and out. My keyboard shortcuts work pretty much the same across every site (aside from the rare exception that tries to be all fancy and implement its own). If they break, it's not rare for me to be able to open up an inspector and add one or two CSS rules that fix the problem. Reading Hacker News, I sometimes wonder if I'm just browsing/using entirely different sites/apps than everybody else is. I don't understand how my experience is so different. Regarding semantic HTML, I generally don't have too much of a problem there either. I don't think semantic HTML is hard to write - I use it on every single one of my sites. If you're using React and it can't be used without spitting divs all over the place, maybe the solution is just to stop using React? Modern HTML is only going to look like div soup if you fill it with divs. I mean, I can build you a horrible SQL database that requires 30 joins on every data call, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SQL is bad. It means that auto-generating SQL tables based on a bunch of cobbled-together frameworks and user-scripts is bad. Treat your application's DOM like you would a schema, and put some thought into it. That will also solve a great deal of the responsive design problems on mobile that people are talking about, because light DOM structures are more flexible than heavy ones.

andybak 8y ago
> I don't think semantic HTML is hard to write - I use it on every single one of my sites. Buzzword-compliant semantic HTML or semantically useful HTML? Is there any user-agent out there that benefits from the extra work you're putting in?

PurpleRamen 8y ago

> Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with a handful of span tags. So just add a layout-language to divide it from the content, as already done with style?

blablabla123 8y ago

Nobody is stopping people from using the relatively new article or header tags. There is not really an inherent advantage in using divs except that they are barebones maybe. Apart from that, there are data attributes which are actually used on real-world websites for annotation of texts. Indeed they go particularly well with span tags. People forget that all these fancy frameworks produce actual HTML5 DOMs, who cares if those are static or dynamic. I someone wants to write a semantic web parser/crawler then it's a great idea, but probably it shouldn't be done using wget. :-)