4 ms·

Not exactly, no. It can be rendered on any operating system, but it is not the rendering language used for all platforms. What I'm talking about is all platform

Not exactly, no. It can be rendered on any operating system, but it is not the rendering language used for all platforms. What I'm talking about is all platforms (web, ios, android, tv, etc etc) using a single standard for representing interfaces. Similar to what happened to network technologies in the 80's and 90's, where all the competing silos agreed to use the http standard.

tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
What I'm proposing is drastic and radical, but consider how insanely expensive it is to create a multi-platform application. Currently all efforts to bridge the gap between platforms sits at the application layer - flutter, react native, electron, etc. It's a massive effort to build an abstraction on top of each of these platforms, because the only common denominator between them is at the OpenGL layer. I think the common layer should be a couple of abstraction layers higher.
chriswarbo 5y ago
> It can be rendered on any operating system, but it is not the rendering language used for all platforms. We could have this right now if iOS, Android, TVs, Windows, macOS, Linux, etc. all used HTML+CSS instead of their own toolkits. Yet they don't. Creating some fancy alternative is an even harder problem, since (a) that alternative needs to be designed and built and (b) all those same platforms will still need to switch, except we would also have to switch over the Web too. This is a political issue, not a technology issue: it requires convincing a whole bunch of organisations to perform a costly change, for little direct benefit to them. This would also be very easy to abuse via "embrace, extend, extinguish". Consider the history of word processors: everyone used the de facto standard (Lotus Notes) for compatibility. When Rich Text Format came along, underdogs like Word could read and write Notes-compatible documents. Once Word's market share rose, Microsoft "extended" the format so its documents could no longer be read reliably by Notes. Customers then switched to Word since it was "more reliable" at reading documents (i.e. it could handle the valid files produced by Notes, as well as the broken junk that Word produced). Of course, Microsoft tried the same thing with HTML (badges like "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" became common precisely because IE did things in an incompatible way; I remember the relief among Web devs when IE7 came out, at its slight move towards compatibility!)
- beigeoak 5y ago
  But why would all of these corporations/platforms choose HTML+CSS when it doesn't even have basic features like good typesetting? The only reason I can think of is familiarity, which is a slippery slope
- 20after4 5y ago
  And today it's becoming common to see "best viewed in google chrome" or, worse, sites that are simply broken in Firefox.
- tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
  Interesting! Although I wonder if similar conditions existed with networks in the 80's - I don't know much about the period but I do know there was competition. I'd be curious to know how http succeeded in that environment, because all the factors you listed should have killed it as well.
  - chriswarbo 5y ago
    TCP/IP faced a lot of competition (e.g. from token rings), but won out probably due to simplicity and robustness. The current dominance of HTTP is largely due to firewalls, NAT, and possibly developer familiarity (e.g. proxying, debugging via cURL, etc.). I wasn't online in the 80s, but I remember networking in the 90s being a mixture of HTTP, POP, SMTP, IRC, FTP, Telnet, NNTP, etc. The noughties saw an increase in protocols for P2P, instant messengers, etc. These days those seem to have consolidated (e.g. BitTorrent, XMPP, etc.), are often tunneled through HTTP, or are displaced by something newer which tends to use HTTP.
- claudionaoto 5y ago
  I think you're confusing something, Lotus Notes was not a word processor. In USA, the most popular word processor before MS Word was WordPerfect.
  - chriswarbo 5y ago
    Ah thanks; I know Lotus was popular, but was probably thinking of Lotus 123 versus Excel. The main point still stands though :)

tenaciousDaniel 5y ago

What I'm proposing is drastic and radical, but consider how insanely expensive it is to create a multi-platform application. Currently all efforts to bridge the gap between platforms sits at the application layer - flutter, react native, electron, etc. It's a massive effort to build an abstraction on top of each of these platforms, because the only common denominator between them is at the OpenGL layer. I think the common layer should be a couple of abstraction layers higher.

chriswarbo 5y ago

> It can be rendered on any operating system, but it is not the rendering language used for all platforms. We could have this right now if iOS, Android, TVs, Windows, macOS, Linux, etc. all used HTML+CSS instead of their own toolkits. Yet they don't. Creating some fancy alternative is an even harder problem, since (a) that alternative needs to be designed and built and (b) all those same platforms will still need to switch, except we would also have to switch over the Web too. This is a political issue, not a technology issue: it requires convincing a whole bunch of organisations to perform a costly change, for little direct benefit to them. This would also be very easy to abuse via "embrace, extend, extinguish". Consider the history of word processors: everyone used the de facto standard (Lotus Notes) for compatibility. When Rich Text Format came along, underdogs like Word could read and write Notes-compatible documents. Once Word's market share rose, Microsoft "extended" the format so its documents could no longer be read reliably by Notes. Customers then switched to Word since it was "more reliable" at reading documents (i.e. it could handle the valid files produced by Notes, as well as the broken junk that Word produced). Of course, Microsoft tried the same thing with HTML (badges like "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" became common precisely because IE did things in an incompatible way; I remember the relief among Web devs when IE7 came out, at its slight move towards compatibility!)

beigeoak 5y ago
But why would all of these corporations/platforms choose HTML+CSS when it doesn't even have basic features like good typesetting? The only reason I can think of is familiarity, which is a slippery slope
20after4 5y ago
And today it's becoming common to see "best viewed in google chrome" or, worse, sites that are simply broken in Firefox.
tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
Interesting! Although I wonder if similar conditions existed with networks in the 80's - I don't know much about the period but I do know there was competition. I'd be curious to know how http succeeded in that environment, because all the factors you listed should have killed it as well.
- chriswarbo 5y ago
  TCP/IP faced a lot of competition (e.g. from token rings), but won out probably due to simplicity and robustness. The current dominance of HTTP is largely due to firewalls, NAT, and possibly developer familiarity (e.g. proxying, debugging via cURL, etc.). I wasn't online in the 80s, but I remember networking in the 90s being a mixture of HTTP, POP, SMTP, IRC, FTP, Telnet, NNTP, etc. The noughties saw an increase in protocols for P2P, instant messengers, etc. These days those seem to have consolidated (e.g. BitTorrent, XMPP, etc.), are often tunneled through HTTP, or are displaced by something newer which tends to use HTTP.
claudionaoto 5y ago
I think you're confusing something, Lotus Notes was not a word processor. In USA, the most popular word processor before MS Word was WordPerfect.
- chriswarbo 5y ago
  Ah thanks; I know Lotus was popular, but was probably thinking of Lotus 123 versus Excel. The main point still stands though :)