5 ms·

who knew? it sneaked up on us. we spent decades wedging compatibility shims into gaping functionality holes, while heroic visionaries of the web as a platform

who knew? it sneaked up on us. we spent decades wedging compatibility shims into gaping functionality holes, while heroic visionaries of the web as a platform toiled and bargained to bring us the tools we needed for modularity, performance, and a modicum of basic platform services. all while making sure <TD STYLE=FLOAT:RIGHT> continued to work.

olliej 5y ago
Apple has been using web views for apps for more than a decade - recognizing that such an object is more generally usable than just "a browser" was a motivation for WebView (now WKWebView) existing as a platform API from the earliest days of WebKit being a thing that existed (The logical extreme being the original WebView API exposed an objc interface to the DOM)
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  And Windows pushed in this direction heavily back around 1999–2005, with things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application and IE being used quite extensively in Windows Explorer in Windows XP and a couple of versions around it. (In fact, if it weren’t for the whole antitrust situation around the inclusion of IE, I suspect they would have gone even further in on web content on the desktop rather than letting it lie fallow for something like fifteen years.) There’s a reason you get system colours and fonts in CSS: they’ve been round since the ’90s. You certainly wouldn’t get such useful and flexible stuff being added now. There are very strong parallels in a lot of the progress that’s been happening in the past few years with what happened twenty years before. Probably the most obvious example is dark mode: computers had that twenty years before, then it got lost somewhere along the way, then it gets reinvented in an only slightly different form (both more and less useful: it’s far more restricted, to just one alternative theme rather than many, but for the web you can actually design for it in CSS alone this time). Cycles.
  - olliej 5y ago
    My recollection of using the old windows HTML control was that it was very useful outside of being a basic content view - obviously there was subsequent additions to the web that made some functionality in webkit available, but the WebView controls in my extremely limited experience seemed a much better fit for minor content views in apps. Of course that's all kind of moot because the important point is that there's a large different between a native app that uses a webview (or the windows/linux equivalent) to display some content, and a cut down browser view trying to act like a native application. Admittedly a number of the bugs in electron apps are a byproduct of their use of chromium which is very much a Mac-second engine and the actual API requires host apps to do much more work for system integration, which is a valid choice: it gives the host app much more flexibility in handling things. The down side is there are some things that apps shouldn't be trying to reimplement themselves.
- __del__ 5y ago
  that makes sense considering khtml, from which webkit evolved, was designed as a web view for the kde desktop environment.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
These pages are the least performant part of the preferences application.

olliej 5y ago

Apple has been using web views for apps for more than a decade - recognizing that such an object is more generally usable than just "a browser" was a motivation for WebView (now WKWebView) existing as a platform API from the earliest days of WebKit being a thing that existed (The logical extreme being the original WebView API exposed an objc interface to the DOM)

chrismorgan 5y ago
And Windows pushed in this direction heavily back around 1999–2005, with things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application and IE being used quite extensively in Windows Explorer in Windows XP and a couple of versions around it. (In fact, if it weren’t for the whole antitrust situation around the inclusion of IE, I suspect they would have gone even further in on web content on the desktop rather than letting it lie fallow for something like fifteen years.) There’s a reason you get system colours and fonts in CSS: they’ve been round since the ’90s. You certainly wouldn’t get such useful and flexible stuff being added now. There are very strong parallels in a lot of the progress that’s been happening in the past few years with what happened twenty years before. Probably the most obvious example is dark mode: computers had that twenty years before, then it got lost somewhere along the way, then it gets reinvented in an only slightly different form (both more and less useful: it’s far more restricted, to just one alternative theme rather than many, but for the web you can actually design for it in CSS alone this time). Cycles.
- olliej 5y ago
  My recollection of using the old windows HTML control was that it was very useful outside of being a basic content view - obviously there was subsequent additions to the web that made some functionality in webkit available, but the WebView controls in my extremely limited experience seemed a much better fit for minor content views in apps. Of course that's all kind of moot because the important point is that there's a large different between a native app that uses a webview (or the windows/linux equivalent) to display some content, and a cut down browser view trying to act like a native application. Admittedly a number of the bugs in electron apps are a byproduct of their use of chromium which is very much a Mac-second engine and the actual API requires host apps to do much more work for system integration, which is a valid choice: it gives the host app much more flexibility in handling things. The down side is there are some things that apps shouldn't be trying to reimplement themselves.
__del__ 5y ago
that makes sense considering khtml, from which webkit evolved, was designed as a web view for the kde desktop environment.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

These pages are the least performant part of the preferences application.