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If you squint a bit, you can view Web-1.0-era UIs as being a bit like a 3270: the terminal downloads the template, the user fills out the fields, and hits the s

by __d 4y ago

If you squint a bit, you can view Web-1.0-era UIs as being a bit like a 3270: the terminal downloads the template, the user fills out the fields, and hits the submit button. That creates a HTTP POST, which is kinda like a CICS transaction. This enables the central CPU running the application server to ignore all the terminal I/O issues, and just deal with a set of transactions implementing the application logic. If the load-balancer and HTTP server are separate machines, then at a high-level boxes-and-lines level, it's not a long way from a mainframe application architecture (at the front end, anyway). But this isn't really accurate, and it's become less superficially similar with more recent web trends where the REST layer isn't a hard boundary, and pre-rendering and so on have muddied the model again.

lproven 4y ago
Yes, agreed, and you're not the first I have heard make that comparison. I think it (as in, late-era Web 1.0 as opposed to Web 2, meaning Javascript everywhere) bears deeper examination. By which I mean, I think the world and the industry got distracted by the shiny, as it always does, and is so into Javascript and building clever stuff in it, that nobody has taken the time to stop and ask: hey, was Javascript a bad idea? Which leads on to... Could we experimentally stop using it and be better off? Could we go back a step, improve upon Web 1, without embedded scripting languages of any kind, and maybe produce a better web based on that? This need not mean stopping anyone doing what they're doing. It merely means someone exploring alternatives on the side. I've been wondering whether there's any way to encourage this. E.g. by crowdsourcing a prize for an annual competition for the best JS-less website or something. Use all the latest shiny in HTML 5, CSS as well if that's what people want -- the last time I designed a web page, CSS hadn't been invented yet, so I know nothing about it -- but no PHP, no Javascript, no scripting at all. Flat static web pages, but using the power of modern computers and browsers to make 'em look nice and work well. I'm aware of things like this: https://1kb.club/ https://1kb.club/ https://250kb.club/ https://250kb.club/ https://1mb.club/ https://1mb.club/ But rather than arbitrary size limits, I am thinking of technological limits. An unanswered question for me is the server side: is serving it from some whizzy dynamic engine that assembles the pages on the fly OK? Or is that a whole different target? Should it be low-tech, i.e. static content only? Or should it be high-tech, but only on the server?

by __d 4y ago

lproven 4y ago

Yes, agreed, and you're not the first I have heard make that comparison. I think it (as in, late-era Web 1.0 as opposed to Web 2, meaning Javascript everywhere) bears deeper examination. By which I mean, I think the world and the industry got distracted by the shiny, as it always does, and is so into Javascript and building clever stuff in it, that nobody has taken the time to stop and ask: hey, was Javascript a bad idea? Which leads on to... Could we experimentally stop using it and be better off? Could we go back a step, improve upon Web 1, without embedded scripting languages of any kind, and maybe produce a better web based on that? This need not mean stopping anyone doing what they're doing. It merely means someone exploring alternatives on the side. I've been wondering whether there's any way to encourage this. E.g. by crowdsourcing a prize for an annual competition for the best JS-less website or something. Use all the latest shiny in HTML 5, CSS as well if that's what people want -- the last time I designed a web page, CSS hadn't been invented yet, so I know nothing about it -- but no PHP, no Javascript, no scripting at all. Flat static web pages, but using the power of modern computers and browsers to make 'em look nice and work well. I'm aware of things like this: https://1kb.club/ https://1kb.club/ https://250kb.club/ https://250kb.club/ https://1mb.club/ https://1mb.club/ But rather than arbitrary size limits, I am thinking of technological limits. An unanswered question for me is the server side: is serving it from some whizzy dynamic engine that assembles the pages on the fly OK? Or is that a whole different target? Should it be low-tech, i.e. static content only? Or should it be high-tech, but only on the server?