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And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web. However much of a hodgepodge the web is, it can and will continue to

And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web. However much of a hodgepodge the web is, it can and will continue to improve incrementally, whereas the a GUI toolkit no matter how technically superior can never cross the chasm to ubiquity, wring your hands though you might.

DanBC 14y ago
I used to think differently, but my time on HN has persuaded me that I'm wrong. I now agree with you. I do miss the "Write it according to the specs and publish it, and anyone on any browser, any OS, any machine, any display type, can access it" attitude. Some people really do need to re-learn the universality of the www, instead of fencing off content inside apps. (Why do newspapers insist on really poor online versions, and mobile versions, and app versions?)
jules 14y ago
The web can, and will continue to accumulate stuff. You can't clean up a mess by accumulating more stuff. There is no technical reason why a proper GUI framework couldn't be as ubiquitous as HTML+CSS+JS+SVG+etc, except that historically it didn't happen that way. It's definitely not inconceivable that somebody will build Kay's VM vision as an abstraction layer on top of web technologies, so that at least we no longer have to deal with the mess in each and every web application separately. If such a VM becomes popular enough we can implement said VM directly instead of on top of existing web technologies.
- dasil003 14y ago
  > You can't clean up a mess by accumulating more stuff. You can't clean up a mess by adding layers, but you can replace layers (eg. you can add web sockets and start driving real time apps that way). Therefore incremental improvement is possible essentially forever. > There is no technical reason why a proper GUI framework couldn't be as ubiquitous as HTML+CSS+JS+SVG+etc, except that historically it didn't happen that way. Agreed. However it's not just accidental either. The web is many things to many people. It's not like cross-platform GUI toolkits failed for lack of trying, but the fact is that they could not reproduce the advantages that the web had in the very beginning. Specifically, it was comically easy to create content and even a browser on any platform in those early days. Obviously over the next decade web tech was severely abused to shoehorn application functionality where it was never intended, and ends up being more complex in the long run. However the number and utility of the dead simple documents is absolutely massive. That, combined with a defacto standard for creating server apps without installation that is perfectly accessible to a layman (theoretically with any disability as well) was the wedge that GUI toolkits never came close to having. Your idea about building a new abstract layer on top of existing web technologies and then reimplementing it natively is the most credible idea I've heard about how the web could be supplanted, and I certainly wouldn't bet against that happening over the coming decades. However I think the web should be a textbook example of how worse is better is not just a conciliatory platitude for disgruntled engineers, but as an actual requirement for certain classes of technology to gain critical mass.
jgon 14y ago
Well I'm not wringing my hands, and I don't think you really have the ability to comment on my body language. Let's keep this debate focused solely on the contents of the talk. The ubiquity and deployability of the web is not an inherent quality of the design of html, css or javascript. The ubiquity and deployability seem to me to be largely due to the internet which is one of the comments that Kay makes. People confuse the workings of the internet with the workings of the web. Right now we send documents that are interpreted, but there is nothing to say we can't send objects which are "interpreted" (or JITed more likely). But his point in the talk I posted was that the amount of accidental complexity that is piling up on the web as we speak (and which will only get worse and worse) will eventually collapse upon itself. You can already see the complexity of things like javascript and css increasing as the web attempts to offer applications, not just documents, and doing this by having a committee standardize high-level behaviour like layout seems to be a poor approach in the long run. Most of the talk is focused on thinking in the long-term as well as working to decrease the complexity of the software edifices we are currently creating, before they become too large to improve in any revolutionary way. Who knows, maybe the next web will be built on top of the web, the way the web was built on top of the internet. The point of his comments in the talk is that we should explicitly think about the design of what we are building before we rush off to pile up code.
- dasil003 14y ago
  You'll have to forgive me not watching the talk yet. I'm not in a position to comment on Kay's entire vision. My comment was aimed squarely at the refrain that we've been hearing from serious engineers for a long time about the utter unsuitability of the web for apps. I find this tiresome because technology doesn't win by being better, it wins by being adopted. Of course there's no technical reason we can't have a better basis than the web for internet apps. It's not about technical limitations, it's about the adoption curve. The perfect cross-platform GUI toolkit in 1992 would have still failed if it required you to write C++ to render your class schedule. The fact that any person with almost no technical expertise can access an app from any computer they sit down at anywhere in the world without requiring installation is actually an amazing achievement that far outweighs the kludginess of the apparatus.
saintx 14y ago
I am enjoying this part of the discussion. One of the things that struck me a few years ago was how the design of the web was so heavily oriented around trying to reproduce the print media industry in a browser. Thus, we get the "markup" of HTML, which provides layout at the expense of structure. Later on, we added CSS which ideally should provide layout, but bad habits learned at an early age or provided by tools that came about in the 90s still haven't caught up in many cases to this day. There's no concept of "line 4 of chapter 3 of book X" in the web, at least not down at its core. You have to shim it in with anchor tags or something similar, and as a result we don't have ubiquitous browser apps that let me highlight a snippet of text in a book, write some notes in the margin (example: "this is a reference to Hamlet's soliloquy"), and then on a whim search for all of Noam Chomsky's (or whoever's) notes on Hamlet, or perhaps search for all public notes on this book in the context of Hamlet. The lack of structure means that everything's this haphazard soup of markup, with the focus being so much on how it looks that structure of the text and the relationship between parts gets lost. I'm not sure the "semantic web" will make up for that lack, but it's probably a good example of how the "next web will be built on the bones of this one" (to paraphrase someone else's comment in this thread).
coldtea 14y ago
>And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web. Actually there are more Windows installations than are internet users. (If you count mobile phones the numbers might skew a little, but the vast majority of those on third world countries are not used for the web anyway).
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Perfect is the enemy of good. If we'd waited for perfect we'd never have linux, we'd still be waiting on hurd. If we'd waited for perfect we'd never have the internet and the web, we'd still be waiting on xanadu.

DanBC 14y ago

I used to think differently, but my time on HN has persuaded me that I'm wrong. I now agree with you. I do miss the "Write it according to the specs and publish it, and anyone on any browser, any OS, any machine, any display type, can access it" attitude. Some people really do need to re-learn the universality of the www, instead of fencing off content inside apps. (Why do newspapers insist on really poor online versions, and mobile versions, and app versions?)

jules 14y ago

The web can, and will continue to accumulate stuff. You can't clean up a mess by accumulating more stuff. There is no technical reason why a proper GUI framework couldn't be as ubiquitous as HTML+CSS+JS+SVG+etc, except that historically it didn't happen that way. It's definitely not inconceivable that somebody will build Kay's VM vision as an abstraction layer on top of web technologies, so that at least we no longer have to deal with the mess in each and every web application separately. If such a VM becomes popular enough we can implement said VM directly instead of on top of existing web technologies.

dasil003 14y ago
> You can't clean up a mess by accumulating more stuff. You can't clean up a mess by adding layers, but you can replace layers (eg. you can add web sockets and start driving real time apps that way). Therefore incremental improvement is possible essentially forever. > There is no technical reason why a proper GUI framework couldn't be as ubiquitous as HTML+CSS+JS+SVG+etc, except that historically it didn't happen that way. Agreed. However it's not just accidental either. The web is many things to many people. It's not like cross-platform GUI toolkits failed for lack of trying, but the fact is that they could not reproduce the advantages that the web had in the very beginning. Specifically, it was comically easy to create content and even a browser on any platform in those early days. Obviously over the next decade web tech was severely abused to shoehorn application functionality where it was never intended, and ends up being more complex in the long run. However the number and utility of the dead simple documents is absolutely massive. That, combined with a defacto standard for creating server apps without installation that is perfectly accessible to a layman (theoretically with any disability as well) was the wedge that GUI toolkits never came close to having. Your idea about building a new abstract layer on top of existing web technologies and then reimplementing it natively is the most credible idea I've heard about how the web could be supplanted, and I certainly wouldn't bet against that happening over the coming decades. However I think the web should be a textbook example of how worse is better is not just a conciliatory platitude for disgruntled engineers, but as an actual requirement for certain classes of technology to gain critical mass.

jgon 14y ago

Well I'm not wringing my hands, and I don't think you really have the ability to comment on my body language. Let's keep this debate focused solely on the contents of the talk. The ubiquity and deployability of the web is not an inherent quality of the design of html, css or javascript. The ubiquity and deployability seem to me to be largely due to the internet which is one of the comments that Kay makes. People confuse the workings of the internet with the workings of the web. Right now we send documents that are interpreted, but there is nothing to say we can't send objects which are "interpreted" (or JITed more likely). But his point in the talk I posted was that the amount of accidental complexity that is piling up on the web as we speak (and which will only get worse and worse) will eventually collapse upon itself. You can already see the complexity of things like javascript and css increasing as the web attempts to offer applications, not just documents, and doing this by having a committee standardize high-level behaviour like layout seems to be a poor approach in the long run. Most of the talk is focused on thinking in the long-term as well as working to decrease the complexity of the software edifices we are currently creating, before they become too large to improve in any revolutionary way. Who knows, maybe the next web will be built on top of the web, the way the web was built on top of the internet. The point of his comments in the talk is that we should explicitly think about the design of what we are building before we rush off to pile up code.

dasil003 14y ago
You'll have to forgive me not watching the talk yet. I'm not in a position to comment on Kay's entire vision. My comment was aimed squarely at the refrain that we've been hearing from serious engineers for a long time about the utter unsuitability of the web for apps. I find this tiresome because technology doesn't win by being better, it wins by being adopted. Of course there's no technical reason we can't have a better basis than the web for internet apps. It's not about technical limitations, it's about the adoption curve. The perfect cross-platform GUI toolkit in 1992 would have still failed if it required you to write C++ to render your class schedule. The fact that any person with almost no technical expertise can access an app from any computer they sit down at anywhere in the world without requiring installation is actually an amazing achievement that far outweighs the kludginess of the apparatus.

saintx 14y ago

I am enjoying this part of the discussion. One of the things that struck me a few years ago was how the design of the web was so heavily oriented around trying to reproduce the print media industry in a browser. Thus, we get the "markup" of HTML, which provides layout at the expense of structure. Later on, we added CSS which ideally should provide layout, but bad habits learned at an early age or provided by tools that came about in the 90s still haven't caught up in many cases to this day. There's no concept of "line 4 of chapter 3 of book X" in the web, at least not down at its core. You have to shim it in with anchor tags or something similar, and as a result we don't have ubiquitous browser apps that let me highlight a snippet of text in a book, write some notes in the margin (example: "this is a reference to Hamlet's soliloquy"), and then on a whim search for all of Noam Chomsky's (or whoever's) notes on Hamlet, or perhaps search for all public notes on this book in the context of Hamlet. The lack of structure means that everything's this haphazard soup of markup, with the focus being so much on how it looks that structure of the text and the relationship between parts gets lost. I'm not sure the "semantic web" will make up for that lack, but it's probably a good example of how the "next web will be built on the bones of this one" (to paraphrase someone else's comment in this thread).

coldtea 14y ago

>And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web. Actually there are more Windows installations than are internet users. (If you count mobile phones the numbers might skew a little, but the vast majority of those on third world countries are not used for the web anyway).

InclinedPlane 14y ago

Perfect is the enemy of good. If we'd waited for perfect we'd never have linux, we'd still be waiting on hurd. If we'd waited for perfect we'd never have the internet and the web, we'd still be waiting on xanadu.