3 ms·

That's not pedantic at all! Indeed, without these capabilities, it is by some definition not the real web. This hits into that concept of what exactly the "web

by taftster 11mo ago

That's not pedantic at all! Indeed, without these capabilities, it is by some definition not the real web. This hits into that concept of what exactly the "web" is. Is it just a media transport system? Or is it something more than that. Of course, we could cite Tim Berners-Lee here or Roy Fielding in this discussion. But at minimum, I think a lot of us are tired of the app-lification of the web and somewhat wish we could have a bit of the old.

xg15 11mo ago
It's also an interesting question, why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome - whereas on the web I'd definitly miss it and in badly designed mobile apps, I often do. I think some part of UI design degraded with the web, where there used to be a clearer distinction between "user data" and "app chrome" areas than there is today. I'd also like if we could get back to selections of more complex data types at some point and not just treat everything as text. UI toolkits have all kinds of lists and treeviews to model selectable entities, whereas in the browser, there just a single huge wall of text for everything.
- kyleee 11mo ago
  Not being able to copy text from UI interfaces is just normalization of deviancy. It should be the norm and it’s subpar when not possible imho
- eviks 11mo ago
  > traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome You've never had to type error code/message instead of copying&pasting? Or use search to jump to a specific settings section?
  - DANmode 11mo ago
    I’ve never done it twice, I can tell you that much!
  - alasdairking 11mo ago
    On Windows, with common messages boxes, you can just do Ctrl+C for copy and you get the message box text in the clipboard. Don't know if that helps you particularly, but it is great when it works and little-known.
    - eviks 11mo ago
      Thanks, doesn't help me, but you're right, a good tip to know. Though I'd still prefer a similar option to start selection directly in the UI instead of finishing the job in a text editor, this would also help highlight text in a screenshot without having to do image post-processing! I'd even accept some arcane finger-breaking ctrl-alt-win-x-y-z (which I could rebind) for the privilege All the more annoying when such years-old fundamentals are broken in all the new "supposedly better" frameworks
- mastazi 11mo ago
  > why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI I do miss this on an almost daily basis and I have stopped paying for services that force me to use an app without offering a website. The last instance of this was just a couple days ago when I could not copy a tracking number from an e-commerce app (to then paste it into the shipping company website) but at least this e-commerce company has a web UI so I could rely on that. Oh and the other one that I miss almost daily is cmd-F / ctrl-F
  - majormajor 11mo ago
    "E commerce apps" are very much not the sort of traditional desktop application they were referring to. Note that they add "in badly designed mobile apps, I often do." They're referring more to things like "you can't copy the text labeling the brush width field in Photoshop" (but you CAN copy the text out of that editable field). It's a part of app design people are extremely lazy with today, as you note. In any sensibly designed desktop package tracking app that number would've been selectable or copy-able text, like how an email subject is in a desktop email app. (Thunderbird, say.) (Interestingly, ctrl-f to find is one that many apps/OSes have now borrowed back, with the ability to "find" items in menus through a Help menu -> Search action.)
  - torben-friis 11mo ago
    Most mobile experiences (and macOS desktop) let you select unselectable stuff with OCR. For macOS is by screencap and selecting on preview, for phones in their respective “ai analysis views” usually long pressing the bottom. I know it’s a silly flow when it could be selectable straight away, just pointing it out.
    - mastazi 11mo ago
      I never tried that, thank you!
    - cons0le 11mo ago
      This is why technology is becoming garbage. In 2025 instead of copy paste, we fire up a gpu in a datacenter. it feels like "software engineering" is just becoming a BS contest for "how much AI can we shoehorn into everything"
- powersnail 11mo ago
  > in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome I forgot what desktop application it was, but there was a time that I repeatedly needed to copy texts from a dialog, which didn't support text selection. It frustrated me so much, that I put together a script to do OCR on the dialog. Supporting complex data types for copy & paste is good; but it is almost trivial to also support plain text copying as a fallback when it already supports copying of other mimetypes. The problem is that some UI has no support of copying in any format at all.
  - gmueckl 11mo ago
    If it was a standard Windows dialog box by any chance, you could just have pressed Ctrl+C with the dialog in focus to copy the message. It's one of these subtle things that go almost completely overlooked.
    - thewebguyd 11mo ago
      There's a lot of nice little things like that in desktop OSes that we completely lose with everyone shifting to using electron, and I'm increasingly frustrated by it as time goes on. on macOS, anything that uses the OS text input box has emacs keybindings. Universal text editing bindings across the entire OS for all native apps. You lose that with electron, just like you lose a lot of the windows niceties the moment apps stop using win32 and start overriding with their own custom UI toolkits in the name of "branding." It's part of the big reason computers started to be perceived as difficult to use, and it's not because of the various operating systems. It's because desktop apps stopped respecting the OS and the user, so instead of only needing to learn the operating system's conventions, which would apply to every app built for it, you now have to learn every individual app's quirks and conventions. The web just continued to make it worse where now every app is it's own little special snowflake.
- croon 11mo ago
  While I do occasionally miss it there as well, I think the main difference is that I very rarely use desktop applications for information gathering. I never "read" a desktop application, whereas that is mostly what I use a browser for. And if I can't properly interact with text on a website, then I would likely reach for something else.
  - majormajor 11mo ago
    Back in ye olden days desktop applications for information gathering like Encarta let you select and copy text because they were thoughtfully designed and knew that "information you were gathering" should be different than "application chrome" - that's the distinction being made here. Information-oriented desktop apps still do this - any good email client, for instance, should make it trivial to copy a subject line or "to"/"from" address even if it's in the UI chrome.
- lproven 11mo ago
  > I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome Good heavens. I boggled at this. It's not every single day, but probably at least once a week I am frustrated by this, and have been since the rise of PC GUIs -- so, coming up on 35 years now. It was often doable on DOS-era PCs, especially if you had a mouse, or a multitasking environment like DESQview, or best of all, both.
  - tracker1 11mo ago
    Same, and especially with error messages/dialogs.
ttd 11mo ago
IMHO there's no gatekeeper of what the "real" web is or should be. It grew organically - regular people building things they liked or needed. It's certainly more of a life necessity than it used to be, but that happened organically too. I know there are strongly held opinions about this, but I for one see no reason why the "application web" can't peacefully coexist, and interlink with, the document web. In my opinion it therefore makes sense to allow for different models for the application web, ones that do not revolve around a document. On the other hand, if we're just bashing on javascript being the lingua franca of the web, that's a train I'll happily board!
- DANmode 11mo ago
  If the “application web” can’t share the text to another app, then forget that.
Kye 11mo ago
I've had the same thoughts as I watch YouTube slowly but steadily subsume "podcast." We were all worried about something like Spotify killing off open RSS feeds for them, but there's a growing number of people who have no idea what a podcast is because people are using the term for YouTube channels with full video and no RSS feed (video or audio) to match it. Sometimes language drift is good, but not when it's done on purpose to get rid of a free and open technology in favor of silos. "Wherever you get your podcasts" only works as long as it's built on top of an open method of syndication.

xg15 11mo ago

It's also an interesting question, why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome - whereas on the web I'd definitly miss it and in badly designed mobile apps, I often do. I think some part of UI design degraded with the web, where there used to be a clearer distinction between "user data" and "app chrome" areas than there is today. I'd also like if we could get back to selections of more complex data types at some point and not just treat everything as text. UI toolkits have all kinds of lists and treeviews to model selectable entities, whereas in the browser, there just a single huge wall of text for everything.

kyleee 11mo ago
Not being able to copy text from UI interfaces is just normalization of deviancy. It should be the norm and it’s subpar when not possible imho
eviks 11mo ago
> traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome You've never had to type error code/message instead of copying&pasting? Or use search to jump to a specific settings section?
- DANmode 11mo ago
  I’ve never done it twice, I can tell you that much!
- alasdairking 11mo ago
  On Windows, with common messages boxes, you can just do Ctrl+C for copy and you get the message box text in the clipboard. Don't know if that helps you particularly, but it is great when it works and little-known.
  - eviks 11mo ago
    Thanks, doesn't help me, but you're right, a good tip to know. Though I'd still prefer a similar option to start selection directly in the UI instead of finishing the job in a text editor, this would also help highlight text in a screenshot without having to do image post-processing! I'd even accept some arcane finger-breaking ctrl-alt-win-x-y-z (which I could rebind) for the privilege All the more annoying when such years-old fundamentals are broken in all the new "supposedly better" frameworks
mastazi 11mo ago
> why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI I do miss this on an almost daily basis and I have stopped paying for services that force me to use an app without offering a website. The last instance of this was just a couple days ago when I could not copy a tracking number from an e-commerce app (to then paste it into the shipping company website) but at least this e-commerce company has a web UI so I could rely on that. Oh and the other one that I miss almost daily is cmd-F / ctrl-F
- majormajor 11mo ago
  "E commerce apps" are very much not the sort of traditional desktop application they were referring to. Note that they add "in badly designed mobile apps, I often do." They're referring more to things like "you can't copy the text labeling the brush width field in Photoshop" (but you CAN copy the text out of that editable field). It's a part of app design people are extremely lazy with today, as you note. In any sensibly designed desktop package tracking app that number would've been selectable or copy-able text, like how an email subject is in a desktop email app. (Thunderbird, say.) (Interestingly, ctrl-f to find is one that many apps/OSes have now borrowed back, with the ability to "find" items in menus through a Help menu -> Search action.)
- torben-friis 11mo ago
  Most mobile experiences (and macOS desktop) let you select unselectable stuff with OCR. For macOS is by screencap and selecting on preview, for phones in their respective “ai analysis views” usually long pressing the bottom. I know it’s a silly flow when it could be selectable straight away, just pointing it out.
  - mastazi 11mo ago
    I never tried that, thank you!
  - cons0le 11mo ago
    This is why technology is becoming garbage. In 2025 instead of copy paste, we fire up a gpu in a datacenter. it feels like "software engineering" is just becoming a BS contest for "how much AI can we shoehorn into everything"
powersnail 11mo ago
> in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome I forgot what desktop application it was, but there was a time that I repeatedly needed to copy texts from a dialog, which didn't support text selection. It frustrated me so much, that I put together a script to do OCR on the dialog. Supporting complex data types for copy & paste is good; but it is almost trivial to also support plain text copying as a fallback when it already supports copying of other mimetypes. The problem is that some UI has no support of copying in any format at all.
- gmueckl 11mo ago
  If it was a standard Windows dialog box by any chance, you could just have pressed Ctrl+C with the dialog in focus to copy the message. It's one of these subtle things that go almost completely overlooked.
  - thewebguyd 11mo ago
    There's a lot of nice little things like that in desktop OSes that we completely lose with everyone shifting to using electron, and I'm increasingly frustrated by it as time goes on. on macOS, anything that uses the OS text input box has emacs keybindings. Universal text editing bindings across the entire OS for all native apps. You lose that with electron, just like you lose a lot of the windows niceties the moment apps stop using win32 and start overriding with their own custom UI toolkits in the name of "branding." It's part of the big reason computers started to be perceived as difficult to use, and it's not because of the various operating systems. It's because desktop apps stopped respecting the OS and the user, so instead of only needing to learn the operating system's conventions, which would apply to every app built for it, you now have to learn every individual app's quirks and conventions. The web just continued to make it worse where now every app is it's own little special snowflake.
croon 11mo ago
While I do occasionally miss it there as well, I think the main difference is that I very rarely use desktop applications for information gathering. I never "read" a desktop application, whereas that is mostly what I use a browser for. And if I can't properly interact with text on a website, then I would likely reach for something else.
- majormajor 11mo ago
  Back in ye olden days desktop applications for information gathering like Encarta let you select and copy text because they were thoughtfully designed and knew that "information you were gathering" should be different than "application chrome" - that's the distinction being made here. Information-oriented desktop apps still do this - any good email client, for instance, should make it trivial to copy a subject line or "to"/"from" address even if it's in the UI chrome.
lproven 11mo ago
> I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome Good heavens. I boggled at this. It's not every single day, but probably at least once a week I am frustrated by this, and have been since the rise of PC GUIs -- so, coming up on 35 years now. It was often doable on DOS-era PCs, especially if you had a mouse, or a multitasking environment like DESQview, or best of all, both.
- tracker1 11mo ago
  Same, and especially with error messages/dialogs.

ttd 11mo ago

IMHO there's no gatekeeper of what the "real" web is or should be. It grew organically - regular people building things they liked or needed. It's certainly more of a life necessity than it used to be, but that happened organically too. I know there are strongly held opinions about this, but I for one see no reason why the "application web" can't peacefully coexist, and interlink with, the document web. In my opinion it therefore makes sense to allow for different models for the application web, ones that do not revolve around a document. On the other hand, if we're just bashing on javascript being the lingua franca of the web, that's a train I'll happily board!

DANmode 11mo ago
If the “application web” can’t share the text to another app, then forget that.

Kye 11mo ago

I've had the same thoughts as I watch YouTube slowly but steadily subsume "podcast." We were all worried about something like Spotify killing off open RSS feeds for them, but there's a growing number of people who have no idea what a podcast is because people are using the term for YouTube channels with full video and no RSS feed (video or audio) to match it. Sometimes language drift is good, but not when it's done on purpose to get rid of a free and open technology in favor of silos. "Wherever you get your podcasts" only works as long as it's built on top of an open method of syndication.