4 ms·

The full title is "Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard" The first sentenc

The full title is "Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard" The first sentence is Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite..." Looking past the poorly edited title this whole thing is clickbait answered with one question. No one really thinks all the interactivity we have in web pages is bad and implying that someone does for clicks is dishonest.

BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
No one really thinks? Well I doubt you never opened a page and sick of it downloading megabytes of JS and breaking navigation because instead of links, the navigation is say React with mouse events hooked and loading parts of the page in the background with spinner graphics. Everything can be done poorly or well. And because modern sites are often done so poorly, the power of interactivity is also seen poorly (it allows you to be worse than if you didn't have it). This does push some people into contemplating restrictions or subsets of the web platform as a standard. Where you simply can't do the travesties we see on popular sites today.
- hota_mazi 4y ago
  > No one really thinks? Well I doubt you never opened a page and sick of it downloading megabytes of JS and breaking navigation because instead of links, There will always be poor examples, but they don't invalidate the concept. Smart web pages, when done right, are an incredible time saver, and if you're not convinced, go visit, for example, the web page of your bank from 15 years ago on the Wayback machine.
  - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
    The prevalence of poor examples does invalidate the concept. More accurately it does NOT invalidate it, but points out we need that concept refined. There's no selective pressure for making a page well-designed, light. Google is trying to to put better designed sites higher up, but they can't hide good content only because it provides horrible bloated UX. I'm not literally against JS? :D
cglong 4y ago
Agreed, I flagged this article due to the clickbaity "and..." in the submitted title.
- gjvc 4y ago
  You are judging a book by its cover by doing this. This site has a length limit on the description field. The "..." is there to signify that something else is following. Is this new to you?
  - cglong 4y ago
    IME, Hacker News titles tend to be edited to fit within the character limit; I actually opened the article despite low personal interest because of the ellipsis. BTW, I was able to catch the updated title before the "unflag" action disappeared, so I was able to remove it. Thanks!
    - gjvc 4y ago
      Very big of you. And so courteous to thank me to boot!
krapp 4y ago
> No one really thinks all the interactivity we have in web pages is bad and implying that someone does for clicks is dishonest. This forum is literally the epicenter of people who think that.
gjvc 4y ago
The full title does not fit in the description field, or did you not realise that?
DonHopkins 4y ago
Sorry for wasting your precious time, but the point of the article was to publish the entire discussion thread so it was easy to read in one place, including some previously unpublished private email discussion, and a citation to the classic "A Clipping Divider" paper, as well as David Rosenthal's correction and comments to some mistakes in Alan Kay's Quora answer, and Alan Kay's correction and comments to some mistakes in Warren Teitelman's article "Ten Years of Window Systems — A Retrospective View" from Methodology of Window Management, and to cite David Rosenthal's blog posting "History of Window Systems" in which he goes into much more detail in response to Alan's original Quora answer. Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View, by Warren Teitelman: http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/p004.htm http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/... A Clipping Divider, by Robert F. Sproull and Ivan E. Sutherland: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1476589.1476687 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1476589.1476687 I think a better title of this discussion would be simply "History of Window Systems", which is the title of David's blog posting that I linked to at the end, if you made it that far. Alan Kay thanked David Rosenthal for writing up that History of Window Systems: "Your blog is a real addition to the history and context needed to really understand and criticize and improve today." Or did you get that far? I guess if you didn't make it past the first 50 characters of the title, you probably didn't make it to the end where all the good stuff is. DSHR's Blog: History of Window Systems: https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/history-of-window-systems.html https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/history-of-window-systems.html >History Of Window Systems: Alan Kay's "Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?" makes important points about the architecture of the infrastructure for user interfaces, but also sparked comments and an email exchange that clarified the early history of window systems. This is something I've written about previously, so below the fold I go into considerable detail. [...] Also, David Rosenthal previously posted to Reddit in 23 years ago in 2000 to correct some misleading comments other people posted: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5311&cid=1075535 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5311&cid=1075535 >I'm Dave Rosenthal. I worked on window systems for a long time. I was one of the authors of the Andrew window system, and NeWS. I did the first port of the X Window System to non-DEC hardware and was one of the team that got X11 release 1 out the door. >This comment has good references, all worth reading. The Methodology of Window Management book is the record of a workshop in 4/85 - it has a lot of pointers to work further back, in particular a paper called "Ten Years of Window Systems" by Warren Teitelman, who was at PARC and then ran the Windows group at Sun. This describes many of the early window systems at PARC. >I'm not going to try to write a complete history, but I do want to correct several misleading statements in the comments to this post. There were several streams of development which naturally influenced each other- broadly: >- Libraries supporting multiple windows from one or more threads in a single address space, starting from Smalltalk leading to the Mac and Windows environments. >- Kernel window systems supporting access to multiple windows from multiple address spaces on a single machine, starting with the Blit and leading to SunWindows and a system for the Whitechapel MG-1. >- Network window systems supporting access to multiple windows from multiple address spaces on multiple machines via a network, starting from work at PARC by Bob Sproull & (if memory serves) Elaine Sonderegger, leading to Andrew, SunDew which became NeWS, and W which became X. >Gosling & I & others at C-MU's Information Technology Center wrote the Andrew window system. We were all post-docs by then, not students. My memory is that it was working OK in the spring of '84. >NeWS was not based on Display Postscript. Gosling built a completely independent (and much faster) implementation of PostScript from the specification that Adobe published as a book. This was SunDew. It was never a fully functional window system. NeWS was a ground-up re-write of SunDew, adding extensive multi-threading and garbage collection to the PostScript clone. My memory is that it was working pretty well by the summer of '86. >Early versions of X were specific to bizarre DEC hardware. While I was working on NeWS at Sun I also did the first port of X10 to non-DEC hardware - to Sun 1,2 & 3 workstations. Experience from this and later ports of X10 was a major input to the redesign that resulted in X11, and this careful design has led to reasonably easy porting to X11 to a wide range of hardware. >I'm not going to comment on the politics which have surrounded window systems, except to say that an individual's rankings of the importance of different technical, aesthetic or licensing features are no more than an individual's views. The market's view of the same features can be quite different without the operation of conspiracies or malign forces. It may simply be that the majority of customers don't agree with your priorities. Original reddit discussion of "What GUIs Came Before X11?": https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/04/1321234/what-guis-came-before-x11 https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/04/1321234/what-guis-came-b...

BulgarianIdiot 4y ago

No one really thinks? Well I doubt you never opened a page and sick of it downloading megabytes of JS and breaking navigation because instead of links, the navigation is say React with mouse events hooked and loading parts of the page in the background with spinner graphics. Everything can be done poorly or well. And because modern sites are often done so poorly, the power of interactivity is also seen poorly (it allows you to be worse than if you didn't have it). This does push some people into contemplating restrictions or subsets of the web platform as a standard. Where you simply can't do the travesties we see on popular sites today.

hota_mazi 4y ago
> No one really thinks? Well I doubt you never opened a page and sick of it downloading megabytes of JS and breaking navigation because instead of links, There will always be poor examples, but they don't invalidate the concept. Smart web pages, when done right, are an incredible time saver, and if you're not convinced, go visit, for example, the web page of your bank from 15 years ago on the Wayback machine.
- BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
  The prevalence of poor examples does invalidate the concept. More accurately it does NOT invalidate it, but points out we need that concept refined. There's no selective pressure for making a page well-designed, light. Google is trying to to put better designed sites higher up, but they can't hide good content only because it provides horrible bloated UX. I'm not literally against JS? :D

cglong 4y ago

Agreed, I flagged this article due to the clickbaity "and..." in the submitted title.

gjvc 4y ago
You are judging a book by its cover by doing this. This site has a length limit on the description field. The "..." is there to signify that something else is following. Is this new to you?
- cglong 4y ago
  IME, Hacker News titles tend to be edited to fit within the character limit; I actually opened the article despite low personal interest because of the ellipsis. BTW, I was able to catch the updated title before the "unflag" action disappeared, so I was able to remove it. Thanks!
  - gjvc 4y ago
    Very big of you. And so courteous to thank me to boot!

krapp 4y ago

> No one really thinks all the interactivity we have in web pages is bad and implying that someone does for clicks is dishonest. This forum is literally the epicenter of people who think that.

gjvc 4y ago

The full title does not fit in the description field, or did you not realise that?

DonHopkins 4y ago

Sorry for wasting your precious time, but the point of the article was to publish the entire discussion thread so it was easy to read in one place, including some previously unpublished private email discussion, and a citation to the classic "A Clipping Divider" paper, as well as David Rosenthal's correction and comments to some mistakes in Alan Kay's Quora answer, and Alan Kay's correction and comments to some mistakes in Warren Teitelman's article "Ten Years of Window Systems — A Retrospective View" from Methodology of Window Management, and to cite David Rosenthal's blog posting "History of Window Systems" in which he goes into much more detail in response to Alan's original Quora answer. Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View, by Warren Teitelman: http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/p004.htm http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/... A Clipping Divider, by Robert F. Sproull and Ivan E. Sutherland: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1476589.1476687 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1476589.1476687 I think a better title of this discussion would be simply "History of Window Systems", which is the title of David's blog posting that I linked to at the end, if you made it that far. Alan Kay thanked David Rosenthal for writing up that History of Window Systems: "Your blog is a real addition to the history and context needed to really understand and criticize and improve today." Or did you get that far? I guess if you didn't make it past the first 50 characters of the title, you probably didn't make it to the end where all the good stuff is. DSHR's Blog: History of Window Systems: https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/history-of-window-systems.html https://blog.dshr.org/2021/03/history-of-window-systems.html >History Of Window Systems: Alan Kay's "Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?" makes important points about the architecture of the infrastructure for user interfaces, but also sparked comments and an email exchange that clarified the early history of window systems. This is something I've written about previously, so below the fold I go into considerable detail. [...] Also, David Rosenthal previously posted to Reddit in 23 years ago in 2000 to correct some misleading comments other people posted: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5311&cid=1075535 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5311&cid=1075535 >I'm Dave Rosenthal. I worked on window systems for a long time. I was one of the authors of the Andrew window system, and NeWS. I did the first port of the X Window System to non-DEC hardware and was one of the team that got X11 release 1 out the door. >This comment has good references, all worth reading. The Methodology of Window Management book is the record of a workshop in 4/85 - it has a lot of pointers to work further back, in particular a paper called "Ten Years of Window Systems" by Warren Teitelman, who was at PARC and then ran the Windows group at Sun. This describes many of the early window systems at PARC. >I'm not going to try to write a complete history, but I do want to correct several misleading statements in the comments to this post. There were several streams of development which naturally influenced each other- broadly: >- Libraries supporting multiple windows from one or more threads in a single address space, starting from Smalltalk leading to the Mac and Windows environments. >- Kernel window systems supporting access to multiple windows from multiple address spaces on a single machine, starting with the Blit and leading to SunWindows and a system for the Whitechapel MG-1. >- Network window systems supporting access to multiple windows from multiple address spaces on multiple machines via a network, starting from work at PARC by Bob Sproull & (if memory serves) Elaine Sonderegger, leading to Andrew, SunDew which became NeWS, and W which became X. >Gosling & I & others at C-MU's Information Technology Center wrote the Andrew window system. We were all post-docs by then, not students. My memory is that it was working OK in the spring of '84. >NeWS was not based on Display Postscript. Gosling built a completely independent (and much faster) implementation of PostScript from the specification that Adobe published as a book. This was SunDew. It was never a fully functional window system. NeWS was a ground-up re-write of SunDew, adding extensive multi-threading and garbage collection to the PostScript clone. My memory is that it was working pretty well by the summer of '86. >Early versions of X were specific to bizarre DEC hardware. While I was working on NeWS at Sun I also did the first port of X10 to non-DEC hardware - to Sun 1,2 & 3 workstations. Experience from this and later ports of X10 was a major input to the redesign that resulted in X11, and this careful design has led to reasonably easy porting to X11 to a wide range of hardware. >I'm not going to comment on the politics which have surrounded window systems, except to say that an individual's rankings of the importance of different technical, aesthetic or licensing features are no more than an individual's views. The market's view of the same features can be quite different without the operation of conspiracies or malign forces. It may simply be that the majority of customers don't agree with your priorities. Original reddit discussion of "What GUIs Came Before X11?": https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/04/1321234/what-guis-came-before-x11 https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/04/1321234/what-guis-came-b...