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The power of the web isn't any one technology, but a combination of two very powerful things: the ability to present arbitrary content with an arbitrary look an
by DanTheDuck 15y ago
The power of the web isn't any one technology, but a combination of two very powerful things: the ability to present arbitrary content with an arbitrary look and feel, and the ability to trivially point a user at someone else's content.
We have a (HUGELY successful) first crack at a platform (HTML, CSS, JS) that enables completely custom UI, presentation and generation of content.
Hyperlinks form the other half of this in that my content can send you over to someone else's content (with their own customized UI and presentation) with a single click of a mouse.
The problem is that people are using the first half of the web as a basis for delivering traditional (thick client, local) applications, and that does indeed suck.
We've become focused far more on the experience than the content. I think that focus is misplaced. We've spent a decade now trying and failing to perfectly implement our content for our UI paradigm and now we're paying the price as that paradigm shifts. I expect that paradigm to shift again before we perfect our new implementations.
- saraid216 15y ago> We have a (HUGELY successful) first crack at a platform (HTML, CSS, JS) that enables completely custom UI, presentation and generation of content. Java Swing lets you do this, too. But no hyperlinks.
- DanTheDuck 15y agoSwing takes a different approach. It is a pluggable widget toolkit rather than a set of lower level constructs used to build primitives.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- DanTheDuck 15y agoThat depends entirely on how you think about "turtles all the way down!" Primitives have to be built from something, our CPUs don't speak HTML natively. We'll use jQuery as an example. People use jQuery bits to build widget sets for their own web UIs. Widget set libraries built on top of lower level libraries (primitives) that are themselves built on HTML/CS/JS. Companies like Microsoft are taking this to a whole new level with their Metro efforts. These kinds of things are where browsers fall down and go boom. As other people have said here, the world is trying to turn documents (unmarked up content) into applications. It was a good first crack at the idea of marking up documents with application code, but ultimately its warts are starting to show.
- carussell 15y agoI deleted my comment because I realized I'd posted hastily without noticing you were the one saraid216 was replying to. So trying to convince you that HTML, JS, and CSS aren't really those sorts of primitives either would be kind of a weird effort, since that's the position you've already taken.