4 ms·

Some thoughts on the web. On web engines, content, and web rent (2023)

39 points by Bluestein 2y ago

Bluestein 2y ago
> In its early days, the web was markup. The browser was to meant to display text with some basic formatting and hyperlinks. At some point in the later evolution, JavaScript was created, allowing websites to dynamically change their content on the device. What happened in the meantime? A mess. This is as good a summary as ever I have seen.- > And I do wish all the best to Servo and Ladybird. But this is just the engines. Interesting times, these ... > The web is, by now, Chromium-shaped. Ending in this conclusion.-
quonn 2y ago
> What happened in the meantime? A mess. So just like any other system, starting with the UNIX system interface, the various shells, the autotools and everything else. Stuff is built on top of other stuff and it is impossible to fully predict the future and start out with a clean design that anticipates all future needs.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  > So just like any other system Granted, that is, I agree.- PS. What the article means by "mess" (in context) is the article's entire gist, that is: "Things have evolved, but they have done so in a way that is ..." ... wrong, counteranimical to the web's "original purpose", opposed to user-interests, etc., etc., ... ... however one would want to define all those things.- Personally, I think the description the author makes of then vs now, has merit.-
dzonga 2y ago
the irony, is while the web is distribution is easy - bandwidth costs are high for both producers and consumers. with apps you download the executable once - and it updates infrequently. saving bandwidth. carefully crafted apps produce smaller binaries as well.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  > carefully crafted Ah! Excellence! That old friend ... (Or, aspirational friend, or girl outta your league, or whatever we want to call it :) But, seriously, by bringing it up you have very aptly, I think, put your finger right on one of the main underlying issues here. Craft. Excellence. Standards.-
- toyg 2y ago
  > bandwidth costs are high for both producers and consumers. But producers are not really paying for bandwidth - they are paying for control. At any point in time they can turn off the tap on users, who have no recourse. Unlike with local executables, there is nothing to hack. That enables SaaS, which is the ultimate rent-seeking business model: you only "own" something only as long as you remain indentured to the company. From that perspective, the company will be more than happy to spend $5 p/m on a user who pays $20 p/m.
- chrisldgk 2y ago
  You can achieve something close to that with websites as well though. You can use service workers and caching strategies so that the user only „downloads“ the boilerplate - i.e. page logic, JavaScript, html structure - and (current) content of your website once and only downloads new or changed content. This is the whole idea of the offline-first model that’s originally made to enable users on mobile devices with spotty internet connections to use your (web-)app without too many hiccups. Granted, this takes some knowledge and development effort, but if your goal is to save bandwidth, it’s absolutely possible. And something more development teams should think about.
- jcynix 2y ago
  Apps, whether carefully crafted, or not, are more often than not just a means to exercise more control over users. At least all those newspaper or <whatever> browsers. That is, they are the almost perfect tracking device. If it's a genuine app which needs a dedicated interface (e.g. gaming, hiking, navigation, even Android Auto in a HUD in my car) that's more or less unavoidable. But all these "readers" should stay in classic web browsers.
- _heimdall 2y ago
samat 2y ago
I like how URL sums it up perfectly: liberda.nl/weblog/javascript-was-a-mistake/
logifail 2y ago
> when we open them, they don't just display a page with an article. We get greeted with banners asking to consent to ad profiling My default browser is Firefox with the excellent NoScript extension. For the majority of websites I visit - including 99.x% of those where I'm just visiting to read content - this works amazingly well. Pages load blazingly fast, no opt-ins, no GDPR banners, no pop-ups. It's glorious.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  Don't you find yourself having to constantly add sites to the whitelist because they fail to work without JS?
red_admiral 2y ago
The topics thing would be a lot less of a problem for me if I could choose and edit them myself. Also, if the ads served up in response weren't almost seizure-inducing flashy things and autoplaying videos and the like. On facebook - which I still have because some societies and other groups I'm involved in use that as their only communication/organization channel - there's a list of topics they infer I'm interested in, both from my own clicks and from my friends'. There's no way, perhaps short of serving a GDPR notice, to edit these and tell them "no you got this one wrong". Just because lots of my friend group likes X doesn't mean I do, and if Facebook got this right they'd even get me to interact _more_ with the sponsored posts as they're showing me topics I care about. As far as I can tell, what's going to happen with topics API is I once help a friend buy some boots online, this gets registered as an interest in /Shopping/Apparel/Footwear/Boots (to take Google's example), and I get ads for more boots for a while even if I couldn't care less (it's already bad enough when you keep seeing ads for a product you've just bought). Also, if I want boots for myself, I'll go to a proper store so I can try them on and make sure they fit just right. I guess I'll still be able to point SQLITE at my topics file just like I can currently use it on my history or cookies file, but it feels like a kludge.
- input_sh 2y ago
  Oh there's a way, it's just under various dropdowns and you have to switch between like 3 different subdomains to end up here: https://accountscenter.facebook.com/ads/ https://accountscenter.facebook.com/ads/
  - red_admiral 2y ago
    ... which currently throws a 500 for me.
    - Bluestein 2y ago
      How 'convenient' ...
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  I've been trying to promote prefers-reduced-motion [1]. I get that some people like "seizure-inducing flashy things" and that companies like to build them. But from a basic design perspective, people should be able to look at your site and read the content. Many sites are not accessible and fail that low bar. If you build flashy things, please allow the user to opt-out. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
joshstrange 2y ago
> In its early days, the web was markup. The browser was to meant to display text with some basic formatting and hyperlinks. At some point in the later evolution, JavaScript was created, allowing websites to dynamically change their content on the device. What happened in the meantime? A mess. No. Evolution happened. Look I was with the author when they started with the Topics API Google shoved into Chrome and I also share the concern about the web turning into chromium but then they go to pretend this isn’t want users wanted. It’s exactly what users wanted, maybe not tech nerds but general users do want these changes by and large. I mean you aren’t going to find anyone who likes that news sites have a million trackers and download MB of data to track and advertise to you but if we set that aside and focus on WebApps (which news sites aren’t) then yes, that’s what people want. I get frustrated with people who appear to pine for the days of the web being just “documents”, before the “evil JavaScript”. Just because something grows and changes doesn’t make it bad and if all you could is browse documents on the web then it wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it is today. People don’t want these changes? Bullshit, they prove over and over again they absolutely do. People want WebApps. Yes, people will complain about subscriptions but they complained about software upgrades as well so I don’t see a difference. People complain about any kind of change if we stopped progress anytime people complained we’d get nowhere. This is going to sound controversial but the best skill you can hone is knowing which complaints to ignore. Not all complaints are valid and sometimes your loudest complainers are the ones you need to ignore most. Getting back to things in the article, Office 365 (which I personally don’t use) and friends are way better than “our IT dept hasn’t upgraded Office in 6 years” and that’s IF you have an IT dept that isn’t the boss’ kid helping out a bit. SMB don’t have IT departments normally or they outsource it, Office 365 really isn’t that expensive given what you get from it (same with Google Workspace). Yes, you pay a subscription or “rent” but it means you don’t have to maintain or manage the process. To many people, especially here on HN, write that off and frankly it’s embarrassing. Just because you can do something yourself doesn’t mean you should. It’s an arbitrary line they draw in the sand and with all arbitrary lines, it’s gets absurd when you move it (should you write your software for everything because you can? Should you haul your own water instead of paying “rent” to the water company?).
- Bluestein 2y ago
  > This is going to sound controversial but the best skill you can hone is knowing which complaints to ignore. Not at all. It's Ford's "they'd still be riding horses".-
8organicbits 2y ago
I've been adopting the mindset that, if you care about the web, you've got to take active measures to promote alternatives to Chrome. That means developing sites using Firefox as your primary browser, rejecting Chrome only features (even when they support progressive enhancement), promoting ad blockers and alternate search engines. Mozilla hasn't been the champion we want them to be, but we can all pitch in.
- gessha 2y ago
  This reminds me of a certain US political situation. More on the topic, I see how it can go both ways. Use Chrome until something better comes up or use Firefox in spite of all of its problems. I’m currently in the second camp and I’m happy but I’m not sure for how long.
nirui 2y ago
> Web app technologies became incoherent, prioritizing developer experience over user, and not making the former great either. The main background problem is (industry) consolidation, because the interest for Web techs is not that hot anymore, the fewer people who still left to improve it might also used their positions to advance their own gains. Sad, but not unheard of. To bring Web back to it's previous glory, it must create enough opportunities in itself to get people are re-interested. But if you observe how today's people uses tech product (i.e. on a phones), you'll know it's really hard if possible at all. The phone platforms (Android and iOS etc) has optimized their services so well, the entire flow, from discovering an tool (app, service etc) to signup/purchase can all be done within just seconds. Unlike back in the day, where you have to search (with a search engine) and compare (by reading online reviews) in order to find the tool you need. Similar thing is also happening on desktop software/OS too. Maybe in this era, web and desktop computing is no longer considered modern?
oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
It frustrates me that some websites rely on JavaScript unnecessarily — for example, Twitter actively locks you out with JS disabled. Even worse are the old Apple docs (I don't know if this is still the case) that were literally just the most basic HTML text documents, but were a blank page without JS. On the other hand, JavaScript can do things that would otherwise be impossible. For example, I have a serverless site that uses JS for search. It's progressive, so you don't really know if you're missing out, but without JS nobody would be able to use that feature.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  You know? "Make the impossible, possible, but do not make that which is possible any more complicated than it needs to be".- PS: Edited. Gonna make me a T-shirt with that :)
- willsmith72 2y ago
  yeah, what people don't get is a huge percentage of the "js" community care about building sites which work pre-js and that can be completely complementary to a heavy-js website. why choose one, you can have both
pjmlp 2y ago
With the help of many devs, and those that keep shipping applications wrapped in Chrome shells, Google has managed to turn the Web into ChromeOS for all pratical purposes. How quickly a new generation has forgotten the IE learnings, in exchange for shinny toys.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  The author speaks to this also, the "Chromification" of the web ...
willsmith72 2y ago
> or that being shown (relevant) ads is the user's interest when browsing the web. the author brushes this off as unlikely. certainly it's not in my interest, but especially from non-tech friends, i hear this a lot. they actually enjoy the high-quality, targeted ads > unreadable, pre-processed JavaScript this is where i'm starting to switch off. yes, let's forbid any improvement in DX, so that a user can inspect the source and understand it. seems like the perfect tradeoff
- Bluestein 2y ago
  > actually enjoy the high-quality, targeted ads Word. I can also attest, strangely. It does exist.- PS. Even if in a "quaint" "would you believe what happened to me the other day? Facebook started showing me x-gizmos just as I was talking about them with so and so the other day ..." (Out loud, of course. Within earshot of an open mic ...)
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  I suspect that I have ADHD and I get distracted really easily on the web. It can be pretty frustrating when I'm trying to get something done, like submitting an application form, and I end up elsewhere. Ads compete for your attention and distract you. Well targeted ads compete for your attention most effectively. So to me, targeted ads are even worse than irrelevant ads. Well targeted ads also require the ad agencies to surveil me...
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    This gets to one problem area the article doesn't dig into - the expectation that everyone has access to, and chooses to, use the internet. If you find the internet distracting and frustrating to use, you should be able to get those same basic tasks like an application form done in other ways. The internet is definitely convenient, and there are tasks that are going to be unique to the internet, but we shouldn't be locked in. We're ruining financial transactions in the same way, the idea that places refuse to accept cash assumes that everyone is interested in using a bank account and credit card company.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jy14898 2y ago
How does tailwind existing imply that "web app technologies became incoherent, prioritizing developer experience over user"? Does tailwind reduce user experience?

39 points by Bluestein 2y ago

> What happened in the meantime? A mess. So just like any other system, starting with the UNIX system interface, the various shells, the autotools and everything else. Stuff is built on top of other stuff and it is impossible to fully predict the future and start out with a clean design that anticipates all future needs.

Bluestein 2y ago
> So just like any other system Granted, that is, I agree.- PS. What the article means by "mess" (in context) is the article's entire gist, that is: "Things have evolved, but they have done so in a way that is ..." ... wrong, counteranimical to the web's "original purpose", opposed to user-interests, etc., etc., ... ... however one would want to define all those things.- Personally, I think the description the author makes of then vs now, has merit.-

dzonga 2y ago

the irony, is while the web is distribution is easy - bandwidth costs are high for both producers and consumers. with apps you download the executable once - and it updates infrequently. saving bandwidth. carefully crafted apps produce smaller binaries as well.

Bluestein 2y ago
> carefully crafted Ah! Excellence! That old friend ... (Or, aspirational friend, or girl outta your league, or whatever we want to call it :) But, seriously, by bringing it up you have very aptly, I think, put your finger right on one of the main underlying issues here. Craft. Excellence. Standards.-
toyg 2y ago
> bandwidth costs are high for both producers and consumers. But producers are not really paying for bandwidth - they are paying for control. At any point in time they can turn off the tap on users, who have no recourse. Unlike with local executables, there is nothing to hack. That enables SaaS, which is the ultimate rent-seeking business model: you only "own" something only as long as you remain indentured to the company. From that perspective, the company will be more than happy to spend $5 p/m on a user who pays $20 p/m.
chrisldgk 2y ago
You can achieve something close to that with websites as well though. You can use service workers and caching strategies so that the user only „downloads“ the boilerplate - i.e. page logic, JavaScript, html structure - and (current) content of your website once and only downloads new or changed content. This is the whole idea of the offline-first model that’s originally made to enable users on mobile devices with spotty internet connections to use your (web-)app without too many hiccups. Granted, this takes some knowledge and development effort, but if your goal is to save bandwidth, it’s absolutely possible. And something more development teams should think about.
jcynix 2y ago
Apps, whether carefully crafted, or not, are more often than not just a means to exercise more control over users. At least all those newspaper or <whatever> browsers. That is, they are the almost perfect tracking device. If it's a genuine app which needs a dedicated interface (e.g. gaming, hiking, navigation, even Android Auto in a HUD in my car) that's more or less unavoidable. But all these "readers" should stay in classic web browsers.
_heimdall 2y ago

samat 2y ago

I like how URL sums it up perfectly: liberda.nl/weblog/javascript-was-a-mistake/

logifail 2y ago

> when we open them, they don't just display a page with an article. We get greeted with banners asking to consent to ad profiling My default browser is Firefox with the excellent NoScript extension. For the majority of websites I visit - including 99.x% of those where I'm just visiting to read content - this works amazingly well. Pages load blazingly fast, no opt-ins, no GDPR banners, no pop-ups. It's glorious.

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
Don't you find yourself having to constantly add sites to the whitelist because they fail to work without JS?

red_admiral 2y ago

The topics thing would be a lot less of a problem for me if I could choose and edit them myself. Also, if the ads served up in response weren't almost seizure-inducing flashy things and autoplaying videos and the like. On facebook - which I still have because some societies and other groups I'm involved in use that as their only communication/organization channel - there's a list of topics they infer I'm interested in, both from my own clicks and from my friends'. There's no way, perhaps short of serving a GDPR notice, to edit these and tell them "no you got this one wrong". Just because lots of my friend group likes X doesn't mean I do, and if Facebook got this right they'd even get me to interact _more_ with the sponsored posts as they're showing me topics I care about. As far as I can tell, what's going to happen with topics API is I once help a friend buy some boots online, this gets registered as an interest in /Shopping/Apparel/Footwear/Boots (to take Google's example), and I get ads for more boots for a while even if I couldn't care less (it's already bad enough when you keep seeing ads for a product you've just bought). Also, if I want boots for myself, I'll go to a proper store so I can try them on and make sure they fit just right. I guess I'll still be able to point SQLITE at my topics file just like I can currently use it on my history or cookies file, but it feels like a kludge.

input_sh 2y ago
Oh there's a way, it's just under various dropdowns and you have to switch between like 3 different subdomains to end up here: https://accountscenter.facebook.com/ads/ https://accountscenter.facebook.com/ads/
- red_admiral 2y ago
  ... which currently throws a 500 for me.
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    How 'convenient' ...
8organicbits 2y ago
I've been trying to promote prefers-reduced-motion [1]. I get that some people like "seizure-inducing flashy things" and that companies like to build them. But from a basic design perspective, people should be able to look at your site and read the content. Many sites are not accessible and fail that low bar. If you build flashy things, please allow the user to opt-out. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

joshstrange 2y ago

> In its early days, the web was markup. The browser was to meant to display text with some basic formatting and hyperlinks. At some point in the later evolution, JavaScript was created, allowing websites to dynamically change their content on the device. What happened in the meantime? A mess. No. Evolution happened. Look I was with the author when they started with the Topics API Google shoved into Chrome and I also share the concern about the web turning into chromium but then they go to pretend this isn’t want users wanted. It’s exactly what users wanted, maybe not tech nerds but general users do want these changes by and large. I mean you aren’t going to find anyone who likes that news sites have a million trackers and download MB of data to track and advertise to you but if we set that aside and focus on WebApps (which news sites aren’t) then yes, that’s what people want. I get frustrated with people who appear to pine for the days of the web being just “documents”, before the “evil JavaScript”. Just because something grows and changes doesn’t make it bad and if all you could is browse documents on the web then it wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it is today. People don’t want these changes? Bullshit, they prove over and over again they absolutely do. People want WebApps. Yes, people will complain about subscriptions but they complained about software upgrades as well so I don’t see a difference. People complain about any kind of change if we stopped progress anytime people complained we’d get nowhere. This is going to sound controversial but the best skill you can hone is knowing which complaints to ignore. Not all complaints are valid and sometimes your loudest complainers are the ones you need to ignore most. Getting back to things in the article, Office 365 (which I personally don’t use) and friends are way better than “our IT dept hasn’t upgraded Office in 6 years” and that’s IF you have an IT dept that isn’t the boss’ kid helping out a bit. SMB don’t have IT departments normally or they outsource it, Office 365 really isn’t that expensive given what you get from it (same with Google Workspace). Yes, you pay a subscription or “rent” but it means you don’t have to maintain or manage the process. To many people, especially here on HN, write that off and frankly it’s embarrassing. Just because you can do something yourself doesn’t mean you should. It’s an arbitrary line they draw in the sand and with all arbitrary lines, it’s gets absurd when you move it (should you write your software for everything because you can? Should you haul your own water instead of paying “rent” to the water company?).

Bluestein 2y ago
> This is going to sound controversial but the best skill you can hone is knowing which complaints to ignore. Not at all. It's Ford's "they'd still be riding horses".-

8organicbits 2y ago

I've been adopting the mindset that, if you care about the web, you've got to take active measures to promote alternatives to Chrome. That means developing sites using Firefox as your primary browser, rejecting Chrome only features (even when they support progressive enhancement), promoting ad blockers and alternate search engines. Mozilla hasn't been the champion we want them to be, but we can all pitch in.

gessha 2y ago
This reminds me of a certain US political situation. More on the topic, I see how it can go both ways. Use Chrome until something better comes up or use Firefox in spite of all of its problems. I’m currently in the second camp and I’m happy but I’m not sure for how long.

nirui 2y ago

> Web app technologies became incoherent, prioritizing developer experience over user, and not making the former great either. The main background problem is (industry) consolidation, because the interest for Web techs is not that hot anymore, the fewer people who still left to improve it might also used their positions to advance their own gains. Sad, but not unheard of. To bring Web back to it's previous glory, it must create enough opportunities in itself to get people are re-interested. But if you observe how today's people uses tech product (i.e. on a phones), you'll know it's really hard if possible at all. The phone platforms (Android and iOS etc) has optimized their services so well, the entire flow, from discovering an tool (app, service etc) to signup/purchase can all be done within just seconds. Unlike back in the day, where you have to search (with a search engine) and compare (by reading online reviews) in order to find the tool you need. Similar thing is also happening on desktop software/OS too. Maybe in this era, web and desktop computing is no longer considered modern?

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago

It frustrates me that some websites rely on JavaScript unnecessarily — for example, Twitter actively locks you out with JS disabled. Even worse are the old Apple docs (I don't know if this is still the case) that were literally just the most basic HTML text documents, but were a blank page without JS. On the other hand, JavaScript can do things that would otherwise be impossible. For example, I have a serverless site that uses JS for search. It's progressive, so you don't really know if you're missing out, but without JS nobody would be able to use that feature.

Bluestein 2y ago
You know? "Make the impossible, possible, but do not make that which is possible any more complicated than it needs to be".- PS: Edited. Gonna make me a T-shirt with that :)
willsmith72 2y ago
yeah, what people don't get is a huge percentage of the "js" community care about building sites which work pre-js and that can be completely complementary to a heavy-js website. why choose one, you can have both

pjmlp 2y ago

With the help of many devs, and those that keep shipping applications wrapped in Chrome shells, Google has managed to turn the Web into ChromeOS for all pratical purposes. How quickly a new generation has forgotten the IE learnings, in exchange for shinny toys.

Bluestein 2y ago
The author speaks to this also, the "Chromification" of the web ...

willsmith72 2y ago

> or that being shown (relevant) ads is the user's interest when browsing the web. the author brushes this off as unlikely. certainly it's not in my interest, but especially from non-tech friends, i hear this a lot. they actually enjoy the high-quality, targeted ads > unreadable, pre-processed JavaScript this is where i'm starting to switch off. yes, let's forbid any improvement in DX, so that a user can inspect the source and understand it. seems like the perfect tradeoff

Bluestein 2y ago
> actually enjoy the high-quality, targeted ads Word. I can also attest, strangely. It does exist.- PS. Even if in a "quaint" "would you believe what happened to me the other day? Facebook started showing me x-gizmos just as I was talking about them with so and so the other day ..." (Out loud, of course. Within earshot of an open mic ...)
8organicbits 2y ago
I suspect that I have ADHD and I get distracted really easily on the web. It can be pretty frustrating when I'm trying to get something done, like submitting an application form, and I end up elsewhere. Ads compete for your attention and distract you. Well targeted ads compete for your attention most effectively. So to me, targeted ads are even worse than irrelevant ads. Well targeted ads also require the ad agencies to surveil me...
- _heimdall 2y ago
  This gets to one problem area the article doesn't dig into - the expectation that everyone has access to, and chooses to, use the internet. If you find the internet distracting and frustrating to use, you should be able to get those same basic tasks like an application form done in other ways. The internet is definitely convenient, and there are tasks that are going to be unique to the internet, but we shouldn't be locked in. We're ruining financial transactions in the same way, the idea that places refuse to accept cash assumes that everyone is interested in using a bank account and credit card company.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jy14898 2y ago

How does tailwind existing imply that "web app technologies became incoherent, prioritizing developer experience over user"? Does tailwind reduce user experience?