3 ms·

Agree very strongly. The amount of innovation we’ve lost because of the high barrier to entry is also staggering to try to conceive.

by bo1024 7y ago

shadowgovt 7y ago
Can you give an example of what innovation we've lost?
- bo1024 7y ago
  The first thing that comes to my mind is accessibility. If browsers were simpler to create and the web were simpler, people could much more easily develop accessibility tools. I think the privacy and tracker-blocking crowd would have a lot more options. You could also have browsers designed for low-power or weak-CPU environments. Better automatic limits on what code runs and when. Next category I picture are browsers with really customized interfaces and displays. Different approaches to navigation, hotkeys. Tiling sites across the screen. Browser functionality could be built into more devices and contexts (e.g. inside another application). I know none of these is "staggering" but I'm one person brainstorming for five minutes. If enthusiasts and hobbyists all over the world could more easily tinker and try things out, who knows what ideas would pop up.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    So curtailing the complexity of sites so that individual users can make heterogeneous deep content. That doesn't actually solve the problem. Excluding webgl so that someone can write an accessibility layer doesn't mean we have an accessible 3D site; it just means we can't do 3D sites.
    - bo1024 7y ago
      That's a tradeoff worth discussing. I think there should be an entirely different cross-platform layer for interactive and intense SPAs like Google Docs and 3D sites. But making it possible for 0.00001% of sites to have 3D comes at a huge cost.
      - shadowgovt 7y ago
        Making it possible for 3% of users to access a site via accessibility APIs comes at a huge cost, but it's done anyway because it's a good idea. The thing about cutting features because they aren't ones that fit one's use case is that there's always someone who doesn't need that use case. "Not a lot of people use it so we should cut it" isn't a great criteria for a platform.
- hansvm 7y ago
  They probably tried, but it was staggering to try to conceive.

Agree very strongly. The amount of innovation we’ve lost because of the high barrier to entry is also staggering to try to conceive.

by bo1024 7y ago

Agree very strongly. The amount of innovation we’ve lost because of the high barrier to entry is also staggering to try to conceive.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Can you give an example of what innovation we've lost?

bo1024 7y ago
The first thing that comes to my mind is accessibility. If browsers were simpler to create and the web were simpler, people could much more easily develop accessibility tools. I think the privacy and tracker-blocking crowd would have a lot more options. You could also have browsers designed for low-power or weak-CPU environments. Better automatic limits on what code runs and when. Next category I picture are browsers with really customized interfaces and displays. Different approaches to navigation, hotkeys. Tiling sites across the screen. Browser functionality could be built into more devices and contexts (e.g. inside another application). I know none of these is "staggering" but I'm one person brainstorming for five minutes. If enthusiasts and hobbyists all over the world could more easily tinker and try things out, who knows what ideas would pop up.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  So curtailing the complexity of sites so that individual users can make heterogeneous deep content. That doesn't actually solve the problem. Excluding webgl so that someone can write an accessibility layer doesn't mean we have an accessible 3D site; it just means we can't do 3D sites.
  - bo1024 7y ago
    That's a tradeoff worth discussing. I think there should be an entirely different cross-platform layer for interactive and intense SPAs like Google Docs and 3D sites. But making it possible for 0.00001% of sites to have 3D comes at a huge cost.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      Making it possible for 3% of users to access a site via accessibility APIs comes at a huge cost, but it's done anyway because it's a good idea. The thing about cutting features because they aren't ones that fit one's use case is that there's always someone who doesn't need that use case. "Not a lot of people use it so we should cut it" isn't a great criteria for a platform.
hansvm 7y ago
They probably tried, but it was staggering to try to conceive.