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As a web developer, I think it is dying, but not in the way you immediately think. Modern websites are starting to resemble full-fledged applications. Built us

As a web developer, I think it is dying, but not in the way you immediately think. Modern websites are starting to resemble full-fledged applications. Built using entire MVC frameworks atop the Javascript runtime that abstract the underlying primitives, just like their native brethren. Today, from a programmer's standpoint, there is little difference between building a native and web application. Every new browser iteration just brings tighter integration into the underlying system. There are no real web-specific technologies being introduced. We are reaching the point where the web serves little purpose other than a clumsy virtual machine. The natural progression will be to go full on virtual machine, like Java attempted to do many years ago, where HTML/CSS/etc is just another application on that virtual machine. The idea of pointing a browser to an address to open an application will stick around, but I think the web parts, a program that renders interlinking hypertext documents, is dying – though certainly not dead yet.

bad_user 15y ago
In the meantime Wikipedia is still the most useful product of the Internet and the biggest database of human knowledge. It's only surpassed in traffic by Google, Facebook, Youtube and Yahoo. the web serves little purpose other than a clumsy virtual machine That clumsy virtual machine can bring you Facebook.com on every mobile phone, regardless of the platform. And if good native apps are now available for Facebook, well, we are talking about Facebook.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- dextorious 15y ago
  """In the meantime Wikipedia is still the most useful product of the Internet""" You missed the point. There's nothing Wikipedia does that cannot be done in an native-gui mobile App. It's just a list of articles, a way to search for them, and a system to edit them. Nothing web particular about Wikipedia, one can imagine a Wikipedia app for mobile and desktop OSs that achieves the exact same thing.
  - jgroome 15y ago
    But surely the success and therefore usefulness of Wikipedia is down to the fact that it's available to everyone with a web browser? Apps are only ever going to have a tiny proportion of the target market, compared to the number of general web users out there. That's what this is about. Of course you can do the same functionality that's made Wikipedia work in an app, but I don't think you'd ever get the numbers needed to make it useful.
    - randomdata 15y ago
      In the model I was referring to, the browser doesn't go away. Only the built-in web does. Replaced by a more general virtual machine with reasonably low level access to the underlying system. We are, more and more, treating the web this way anyway. It is becoming a pointless abstraction. There is no particular reason for HTML, CSS, etc. to be built-in components, but that does not mean the web has to go away completely. If your network location wants to load an HTML document, you can command the browser to fetch an HTML renderer over the network. But you can just as easily serve an application of another kind, depending on your desires and needs.
    - dextorious 15y ago
      """But surely the success and therefore usefulness of Wikipedia is down to the fact that it's available to everyone with a web browser? """ It's success when it was created, and maybe now, yes. But how about a future where everything has a mobile phone and/or tablet, but fewer have or care to use a web browser?
      - bad_user 15y ago
        Normal people never cared about web browsers, but that didn't stop web browsers from spreading like a virus. Most of them don't even understand the concept. If you ask them what a browser is, they'll probably answer Google. As an example, I love my e-Ink Kindle. The one big annoyance I have is that the browser on it is so awful that it is unusable. And it bothers me because book authors are often placing links to external references in the books I read. And I just want to read those references. Maybe add a comment or two if it's a blog. Since I'm there anyway, maybe I want to recommend the book on Facebook or Twitter with, you guessed it, a link. Maybe I want to search on the web for other discussions on the topic. And so on and so forth. It's not about love for the web browser per se. The browser is an awful virtual machine. Also the HTTP protocol is one of the featureless protocols in existence. The development model is scary sometimes as you've got to learn dozens of technologies, each specialized for a certain task, each broken in its own special way. But developers bitching about this are missing the point. It turns out that the openness of the web is disruptive and simple form elements communicating over a simple protocol is all you ever need for 80% of the use-cases. Quite the contrary, I'm seeing the web stronger than ever before. The one big problem I'm seeing however are walled gardens. Some day from now we'll look back and actually see what a big mistake this was. But the web as we know it will still be there. Because nothing can really replace it.
r00fus 15y ago
> Modern websites are starting to resemble full-fledged applications. So more of the code is going to the VM on the client... this pendulum swings back and forth. What about efforts like Amazon Silk and Opera mini that encapsulate all the client logic in the cloud? Sure they may suck now, but in the future they may be more mature and standardized... thus the pendulum could swing back.

bad_user 15y ago

In the meantime Wikipedia is still the most useful product of the Internet and the biggest database of human knowledge. It's only surpassed in traffic by Google, Facebook, Youtube and Yahoo. the web serves little purpose other than a clumsy virtual machine That clumsy virtual machine can bring you Facebook.com on every mobile phone, regardless of the platform. And if good native apps are now available for Facebook, well, we are talking about Facebook.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
dextorious 15y ago
"""In the meantime Wikipedia is still the most useful product of the Internet""" You missed the point. There's nothing Wikipedia does that cannot be done in an native-gui mobile App. It's just a list of articles, a way to search for them, and a system to edit them. Nothing web particular about Wikipedia, one can imagine a Wikipedia app for mobile and desktop OSs that achieves the exact same thing.
- jgroome 15y ago
  But surely the success and therefore usefulness of Wikipedia is down to the fact that it's available to everyone with a web browser? Apps are only ever going to have a tiny proportion of the target market, compared to the number of general web users out there. That's what this is about. Of course you can do the same functionality that's made Wikipedia work in an app, but I don't think you'd ever get the numbers needed to make it useful.
  - randomdata 15y ago
    In the model I was referring to, the browser doesn't go away. Only the built-in web does. Replaced by a more general virtual machine with reasonably low level access to the underlying system. We are, more and more, treating the web this way anyway. It is becoming a pointless abstraction. There is no particular reason for HTML, CSS, etc. to be built-in components, but that does not mean the web has to go away completely. If your network location wants to load an HTML document, you can command the browser to fetch an HTML renderer over the network. But you can just as easily serve an application of another kind, depending on your desires and needs.
  - dextorious 15y ago
    """But surely the success and therefore usefulness of Wikipedia is down to the fact that it's available to everyone with a web browser? """ It's success when it was created, and maybe now, yes. But how about a future where everything has a mobile phone and/or tablet, but fewer have or care to use a web browser?
    - bad_user 15y ago
      Normal people never cared about web browsers, but that didn't stop web browsers from spreading like a virus. Most of them don't even understand the concept. If you ask them what a browser is, they'll probably answer Google. As an example, I love my e-Ink Kindle. The one big annoyance I have is that the browser on it is so awful that it is unusable. And it bothers me because book authors are often placing links to external references in the books I read. And I just want to read those references. Maybe add a comment or two if it's a blog. Since I'm there anyway, maybe I want to recommend the book on Facebook or Twitter with, you guessed it, a link. Maybe I want to search on the web for other discussions on the topic. And so on and so forth. It's not about love for the web browser per se. The browser is an awful virtual machine. Also the HTTP protocol is one of the featureless protocols in existence. The development model is scary sometimes as you've got to learn dozens of technologies, each specialized for a certain task, each broken in its own special way. But developers bitching about this are missing the point. It turns out that the openness of the web is disruptive and simple form elements communicating over a simple protocol is all you ever need for 80% of the use-cases. Quite the contrary, I'm seeing the web stronger than ever before. The one big problem I'm seeing however are walled gardens. Some day from now we'll look back and actually see what a big mistake this was. But the web as we know it will still be there. Because nothing can really replace it.

r00fus 15y ago

> Modern websites are starting to resemble full-fledged applications. So more of the code is going to the VM on the client... this pendulum swings back and forth. What about efforts like Amazon Silk and Opera mini that encapsulate all the client logic in the cloud? Sure they may suck now, but in the future they may be more mature and standardized... thus the pendulum could swing back.