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> Enumerate all the features of the web you can think of that have enabled it to explode and thrive compared to networked applications and the popular VMs of th

by nupark2 15y ago

> Enumerate all the features of the web you can think of that have enabled it to explode and thrive compared to networked applications and the popular VMs of the last 20 years. Ubiquitous cross-platform adoption. Done. The web grew popular (relative to the Internet population) before it got JavaScript, not after. It wasn't JavaScript that drove widespread adoption, and it wasn't applications built in JavaScript.

wwweston 15y ago
> Ubiquitous cross-platform adoption. Done. Well, that's at least part of the reason why we disagree. The list is longer, and includes (but may not be limited to): * view source - up until minifiers, there wasn't anything happening on the client side that you couldn't see how it was done yourself. * gentle learning curve - the entry level to simple web publishing was achievable for anybody who could transfer "view codes" style word-processing concepts to markup and manage file transfer client. A little learning or some copy and paste could take you up the next gentle step to limited scripting. * Hypermedia nature of the platform - instead of applications being little silos that only interoperate with a relatively small number of apps from the same organization (or other organizations where they've made deals), hypermedia docs were a sprawling web of connections constantly pointing to other document-applications. If you'd dropped a perfect universal VM on every desktop in 1995, it's extremely unlikely things would have fallen out like this. It certainly didn't for the imperfect one. > The web grew popular (relative to the Internet population) before it got JavaScript, not after. It wasn't JavaScript that drove widespread adoption A 1995 release means that the first statement is only defensible given the flexible nature of popular. The second statement is truer in decreasing terms through 2004 or so, when it bottoms out. That's tangential, though. The real question is more along the lines of whether the web would be everything it is now if instead of passing around a single strain of fairly standardized (though expanding over time) markup, we instead were sending drawing instructions and collecting events. Or maybe even a single binary-encoded standard for abstracted document trees designed for optimal machine consumption, generated from various different applications or compiled from other document schemes. Their answers to that question are why a lot of people think it might be a better idea to have single scripting language, and the one we've got has turned out to be pretty capable so far.

by nupark2 15y ago

wwweston 15y ago

> Ubiquitous cross-platform adoption. Done. Well, that's at least part of the reason why we disagree. The list is longer, and includes (but may not be limited to): * view source - up until minifiers, there wasn't anything happening on the client side that you couldn't see how it was done yourself. * gentle learning curve - the entry level to simple web publishing was achievable for anybody who could transfer "view codes" style word-processing concepts to markup and manage file transfer client. A little learning or some copy and paste could take you up the next gentle step to limited scripting. * Hypermedia nature of the platform - instead of applications being little silos that only interoperate with a relatively small number of apps from the same organization (or other organizations where they've made deals), hypermedia docs were a sprawling web of connections constantly pointing to other document-applications. If you'd dropped a perfect universal VM on every desktop in 1995, it's extremely unlikely things would have fallen out like this. It certainly didn't for the imperfect one. > The web grew popular (relative to the Internet population) before it got JavaScript, not after. It wasn't JavaScript that drove widespread adoption A 1995 release means that the first statement is only defensible given the flexible nature of popular. The second statement is truer in decreasing terms through 2004 or so, when it bottoms out. That's tangential, though. The real question is more along the lines of whether the web would be everything it is now if instead of passing around a single strain of fairly standardized (though expanding over time) markup, we instead were sending drawing instructions and collecting events. Or maybe even a single binary-encoded standard for abstracted document trees designed for optimal machine consumption, generated from various different applications or compiled from other document schemes. Their answers to that question are why a lot of people think it might be a better idea to have single scripting language, and the one we've got has turned out to be pretty capable so far.