4 ms·

If browsers had stuck to being document viewers, we'd have invented a new technology to do everything we do today, and the web would be like gopher.

goatlover 4y ago
The technology already existed with the JVM, .Net, Flash, Silverlight, etc. It would just be a different runtime than the browser. Mobile app stores are that.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  iow proprietary fiefdoms
  - rektide 4y ago
    And it's entirely unclear what any of these non-view-source minimal-user-agency alternatives has that's actually improved over what the web can do. There's no contentions about what about these alternatives would be an improvement, or to whom it would be an improvement. Most of these architectures could probably be recreated on the web, if we cared to, if we thought they provided sufficient advantage. Projects like swf2js are surprisingly competent at playing Flash. But it's... just not a better medium, for users, for extension builders, or for developers. It did have some good tooling for creatives at least, but there are plenty of really good modern web tools with similar capabilities, they're just not as popular, not as important anymore, I'd argue because Flash was actually a pretty crude & raw interface builder that lacked much of the refinement, navigability, control, & capabilities we now take for granted.
    - goatlover 4y ago
      What do you have in mind that beats Flash as an SVG animation development platform?
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > It did have some good tooling for creatives at least, but there are plenty of really good modern web tools with similar capabilities There really aren't. Because the web can't even do animations properly. And Flash had a faster vector rendering model than SVG. > I'd argue because Flash was actually a pretty crude & raw interface builder that lacked much of the refinement, navigability, control, & capabilities we now take for granted. Ah yes, the refinement, navigability, control and capabilities of... what exactly do we take for granted? Where are these amazing tools that replaced flash and can be used for creatives, games, interactions...
- still_grokking 4y ago
  Even Flash was much more sane for application development than HTML / JS. But as always, the cheapest "solution" won.
  - jakelazaroff 4y ago
    Let’s say you’re blind. How do you use a Flash application with a screen reader?
    - wmf 4y ago
      It was apparently possible, although 15 years late. http://maccessibility.net/2010/03/24/adobe-announces-flash-and-flex-accessibility-for-mac http://maccessibility.net/2010/03/24/adobe-announces-flash-a...
    - still_grokking 4y ago
      https://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/accessibility/package-detail.html https://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actions... https://web.archive.org/web/20170617075857/http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flash.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170617075857/http://www.adobe....
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      We are getting there again with WebGL and WASM.
dahfizz 4y ago
Yeah, we would have invented a tech stack that is actually good. JavaScript+ HTML is just about the worst option imaginable if you were to design a cross platform gui application runner from the ground up.
- anonymouse008 4y ago
  For everything else, there’s electron
- seandoe 4y ago
  I hear some version of this all the time. Why then are gui systems like electron so popular and why do new design systems continue to incorporate html/CSS as the design tools? If it's so bad why hasn't something else replaced it? If something truly better was developed it would be wildly successful. I don't know the answer, but I'm guessing cross-platform frameworks are just really difficult to develop. You say "just about the worst option imaginable", but the evidence doesn't really suggest that.
  - rektide 4y ago
    > You say "just about the worst option imaginable", but the evidence doesn't really suggest that. Notably, the anti-web mob almost never bothers to articulate why it is they think the web is bad at all! This is another classic case, of inchoate disparagement, with no specific claims to be backed nor refuted. I want to be a sponge, to embrace good ideas, to hear & listen to what people think might improve or enhance things. But there's rarely real problems cited (or there are gross mis-understandings), and much rarer still is a better path or possibility articulated. I'd love some genuine discussion of the web, but the silent majority seems ok-enough or better working the web regularly, and the protestors against the web tend towards blunt & undirected. One conflict I do see as visible again and again is the expectation of what the web should be. There seems to be quite a lot of hostility to the web being a low level platform, to it not having a single consistent development style. This leads to a lot of "the web was never meant to do this!" sort of feelings, but that doesn't really argue whether this iterated adaptability the Document Object Model has spawned serves us well or poorly. One thing that is true is that the DOM is a low level platform, that it's not higher level. It doesn't compactly solve all or even most of the problems. To me, this is the critical value of the web, that which makes it so much better & more powerful: that we are free to express multiple architectures, free to innovate our UI patterns & do so, while still keeping the same underlying bones. This has begat great cross pollination across many different tribes of webdevelopment, has continued to make the web a crossroads of development, where many ideas cross paths & new ventures, new trials are began. It compares versus near-literally everything else, where isolated communities come and go (even within corporate walls, e.g. Microsoft's GDI, WPF, Silverlight, WinUi, DirectDraw, WinRT, UWP/Uno, .NET MAUI, or GTK's major 1, 2, 3, 4, & Adiwata reworks), ideas for how to make interfaces rise & fall, never quite satisfying. There's protests against the web being fast enough, but frankly it's horsepucky. The browser is intensely optimized & stunningly fast at all kinds of things. It does not however prevent mis-use, prevent bad code. Often installing ad-blockers (something not doable in apps note you) is enough to get users to lightspeed. The web has made a great Bazaar, a great place for a conflux of possibilities, and has proven vastly malleable as a medium & platform, boosted so much further by it's connectivity-at-the-core versus applications which bolt-it-on, and given far greater reach than the developer-centric gui toolkits of yore. So much is possible here, and the great reverberating om keeps giving, keeps exploring. But, it feels like, so many just want the Cathedral, the one specific incarnation that is well shaped, that everyone can just do. I just hope we can have some discussions about what would make a good Cathedral, what properties & virtues it would have, because i think the Bazaar will probably ultimately accomplish those ends better, but if we can't engage & discuss, no one wins.
still_grokking 4y ago
This would be so good. DHTML is the greatest hack in all history. It's almost unbelievable that we're using such a kludge for almost all user-facing application development today.
- sedatk 4y ago
  Any hack that lingers long enough is a paradigm.
  - still_grokking 4y ago
    There seems to be truth in that. Now I'm thinking about Unix. (I may say that, as someone using exclusively a Linux desktop since more than 20 years ;-)).

goatlover 4y ago

The technology already existed with the JVM, .Net, Flash, Silverlight, etc. It would just be a different runtime than the browser. Mobile app stores are that.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
iow proprietary fiefdoms
- rektide 4y ago
  And it's entirely unclear what any of these non-view-source minimal-user-agency alternatives has that's actually improved over what the web can do. There's no contentions about what about these alternatives would be an improvement, or to whom it would be an improvement. Most of these architectures could probably be recreated on the web, if we cared to, if we thought they provided sufficient advantage. Projects like swf2js are surprisingly competent at playing Flash. But it's... just not a better medium, for users, for extension builders, or for developers. It did have some good tooling for creatives at least, but there are plenty of really good modern web tools with similar capabilities, they're just not as popular, not as important anymore, I'd argue because Flash was actually a pretty crude & raw interface builder that lacked much of the refinement, navigability, control, & capabilities we now take for granted.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    What do you have in mind that beats Flash as an SVG animation development platform?
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > It did have some good tooling for creatives at least, but there are plenty of really good modern web tools with similar capabilities There really aren't. Because the web can't even do animations properly. And Flash had a faster vector rendering model than SVG. > I'd argue because Flash was actually a pretty crude & raw interface builder that lacked much of the refinement, navigability, control, & capabilities we now take for granted. Ah yes, the refinement, navigability, control and capabilities of... what exactly do we take for granted? Where are these amazing tools that replaced flash and can be used for creatives, games, interactions...
still_grokking 4y ago
Even Flash was much more sane for application development than HTML / JS. But as always, the cheapest "solution" won.
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
  Let’s say you’re blind. How do you use a Flash application with a screen reader?
  - wmf 4y ago
    It was apparently possible, although 15 years late. http://maccessibility.net/2010/03/24/adobe-announces-flash-and-flex-accessibility-for-mac http://maccessibility.net/2010/03/24/adobe-announces-flash-a...
  - still_grokking 4y ago
    https://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/flash/accessibility/package-detail.html https://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actions... https://web.archive.org/web/20170617075857/http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flash.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170617075857/http://www.adobe....
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    We are getting there again with WebGL and WASM.

dahfizz 4y ago

Yeah, we would have invented a tech stack that is actually good. JavaScript+ HTML is just about the worst option imaginable if you were to design a cross platform gui application runner from the ground up.

anonymouse008 4y ago
For everything else, there’s electron
seandoe 4y ago
I hear some version of this all the time. Why then are gui systems like electron so popular and why do new design systems continue to incorporate html/CSS as the design tools? If it's so bad why hasn't something else replaced it? If something truly better was developed it would be wildly successful. I don't know the answer, but I'm guessing cross-platform frameworks are just really difficult to develop. You say "just about the worst option imaginable", but the evidence doesn't really suggest that.
- rektide 4y ago
  > You say "just about the worst option imaginable", but the evidence doesn't really suggest that. Notably, the anti-web mob almost never bothers to articulate why it is they think the web is bad at all! This is another classic case, of inchoate disparagement, with no specific claims to be backed nor refuted. I want to be a sponge, to embrace good ideas, to hear & listen to what people think might improve or enhance things. But there's rarely real problems cited (or there are gross mis-understandings), and much rarer still is a better path or possibility articulated. I'd love some genuine discussion of the web, but the silent majority seems ok-enough or better working the web regularly, and the protestors against the web tend towards blunt & undirected. One conflict I do see as visible again and again is the expectation of what the web should be. There seems to be quite a lot of hostility to the web being a low level platform, to it not having a single consistent development style. This leads to a lot of "the web was never meant to do this!" sort of feelings, but that doesn't really argue whether this iterated adaptability the Document Object Model has spawned serves us well or poorly. One thing that is true is that the DOM is a low level platform, that it's not higher level. It doesn't compactly solve all or even most of the problems. To me, this is the critical value of the web, that which makes it so much better & more powerful: that we are free to express multiple architectures, free to innovate our UI patterns & do so, while still keeping the same underlying bones. This has begat great cross pollination across many different tribes of webdevelopment, has continued to make the web a crossroads of development, where many ideas cross paths & new ventures, new trials are began. It compares versus near-literally everything else, where isolated communities come and go (even within corporate walls, e.g. Microsoft's GDI, WPF, Silverlight, WinUi, DirectDraw, WinRT, UWP/Uno, .NET MAUI, or GTK's major 1, 2, 3, 4, & Adiwata reworks), ideas for how to make interfaces rise & fall, never quite satisfying. There's protests against the web being fast enough, but frankly it's horsepucky. The browser is intensely optimized & stunningly fast at all kinds of things. It does not however prevent mis-use, prevent bad code. Often installing ad-blockers (something not doable in apps note you) is enough to get users to lightspeed. The web has made a great Bazaar, a great place for a conflux of possibilities, and has proven vastly malleable as a medium & platform, boosted so much further by it's connectivity-at-the-core versus applications which bolt-it-on, and given far greater reach than the developer-centric gui toolkits of yore. So much is possible here, and the great reverberating om keeps giving, keeps exploring. But, it feels like, so many just want the Cathedral, the one specific incarnation that is well shaped, that everyone can just do. I just hope we can have some discussions about what would make a good Cathedral, what properties & virtues it would have, because i think the Bazaar will probably ultimately accomplish those ends better, but if we can't engage & discuss, no one wins.

still_grokking 4y ago

This would be so good. DHTML is the greatest hack in all history. It's almost unbelievable that we're using such a kludge for almost all user-facing application development today.

sedatk 4y ago
Any hack that lingers long enough is a paradigm.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  There seems to be truth in that. Now I'm thinking about Unix. (I may say that, as someone using exclusively a Linux desktop since more than 20 years ;-)).