3 ms·
Why is everyone trying to turn webpages into things other than webpages? What was wrong with text, links, and scrollbars?
by rabidsnail 14y ago
Why is everyone trying to turn webpages into things other than webpages? What was wrong with text, links, and scrollbars?
- robmcm 14y agoPeople said the same thing about DOS.
- yason 14y agoThat's a good question, I think the reason is that the platform built around viewing web pages is way too flexible and versatile to be dismissed as merely a structured text markup document viewer. Basically document markup processors are text-driven programs and all programmers know it's just too easy to hook up extra functionality if the behaviour of your program is already defined by a textual input file. Thus <blink>, then JavaScript, and a bit later, WebGL. The text, links, and scrollbars approach is excellent for presenting information (i.e. text documents with images). Happily, the current capabilities of the platform don't preclude this sort of presentation. Certainly some fraction of genuinely informational sites these days are more like programs than documents but I just think in addition to all old and new text+link documents there's a huge array of mostly non-informational entertainment sites that didn't exist in "web 1.0". I could live with the old-style hypermedia web, too, but sometimes I just wonder if the printing presses ever thought "Damn, these machines were built to print books and distribute information and now these newcomer publishers are using them to print stupid TV magazines with little if any content."
- puppymaster 14y agobecause sometimes some of us want to experiment with things, to push the envelope and if not anything, to have fun.