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> I feel like the web used to work better. Not in the sense of features or flagship sites—web-based email clients and word processors and image editors are all
by lmm 3y ago
> I feel like the web used to work better. Not in the sense of features or flagship sites—web-based email clients and word processors and image editors are all waaay better than they used to be and I would say the high-quality stuff is of higher quality than ever. I’m not pining for the HTML-only version of GMail, I promise. But if I were to estimate some rough median of “how well do websites work” I would also say that there’s an incredible amount of jank out there.
Nah. I remember that era. It all sucked, except Flash, which was the only way to have interactive sites that weren't awful. The main reason websites work even less well now is that they got rid of Flash so you have to use an informally-specified bug-ridden implementation of half of Flash instead.
> They expect the Back button to work, and they expect that the stuff they filled out on the previous page will be there when they click it. And it would! If you would just let the browser do what it wants to do!
That's a very recent change, and only after a literal decade of people using javascript to do this put enough pressure on browser makers to fix such basic functionality. I'm not sure it's even implemented in all common browsers yet.
> Every broken contact form or booking site is a truly spectacular own-goal. If your calendar was a bunch of progressively enhanced checkboxes and a submit button, you could be riding off into the sunset and counting money instead of taking support calls from frustrated octogenarians.
Nah. If you did that progressive enhancement nonsense it would take 3x as long and would still work less well. Frankly the biggest thing holding back the web is the opposite, people keep trying to use the broken and awful browser widgets and technologies instead of declaring bankruptcy and just rendering their system via one big canvas element like you would if you were writing a program in a real programming language. We've been trying progressive enhancement for 30 years and it still sucks; how bad does it have to get before we start trying something different?
- WA 3y ago> and just rendering their system via one big canvas element Interesting perspective, but I'm not sure if this would really solve the problem. You'd have to implement so much functionality that we take for granted (selecting text, copy & paste, accessibility, keyboard shortcuts, etc.). If you don't want to do it yourself, you have to use a widget library or some kind of UI kit. Maybe like Flutter. The web-version of a Flutter app renders everything to canvas (with a lot of caveats). Since people bring their own UI libs for their JS-CSS-HTML web apps all the time, they will probably do the same with a pure canvas implementation and the result would be even shittier, because half of them will forget basic functionality.
- lmm 3y ago> You'd have to implement so much functionality that we take for granted (selecting text, copy & paste, accessibility, keyboard shortcuts, etc.). If you don't want to do it yourself, you have to use a widget library or some kind of UI kit. Maybe like Flutter. The web-version of a Flutter app renders everything to canvas (with a lot of caveats). > Since people bring their own UI libs for their JS-CSS-HTML web apps all the time, they will probably do the same with a pure canvas implementation and the result would be even shittier, because half of them will forget basic functionality. The thing is that it's much easier for a UI lib to fix missing functionality than a browser. And when the fix is ready, the webdev can bump the dependency and then it's fixed for all their users, rather than having to hope that it somehow makes it through their vendor's update process. So even if the UI libs are initially worse, I'd expect them to overtake the browser builtins pretty quickly.