3 ms·
It's a great talk, and I wish I'd seen it. I found myself nodding quite a lot, despite not being a designer (though I used to play one before I got in to tech/c
by kolektiv 13y ago
It's a great talk, and I wish I'd seen it. I found myself nodding quite a lot, despite not being a designer (though I used to play one before I got in to tech/code). And in many ways he's right.
But I did find myself questioning the premise towards the end. Why do we want to save "the web" in the form it was? Apps, etc. are different. Certainly they raise the barriers between the average user and creation in the way that the web traditionally didn't.
But to do well on the web these days - is that really as easy it was anyway? The standards are more complex. If you want to stand out in a real way that's probably going to take something like an App's worth of effort.
So do we want to encourage the web - a small and quite specific (and, perhaps, time-bound) layer? Or do we want to be focusing on the internet? Because that's doing great. I hear it's huge. And all of these apps - well, they use the internet, just maybe not the web.
I don't know what the next 20 years will look like (I do remember what things looked like from about '96 onwards, when I first started dabbling) but I think we should stand a little further back than trying to maintain something because "it was great". Maybe it was, but maybe it's not the right answer for the future.
EDIT: (To reply to some of the comments/downvotes)
I wasn't suggesting a world of Apps. I was suggesting a world of "other" approaches. The internet is also open and standards based. There are many standards which don't sit on top of HTTP. What I meant to point out is that the internet is not the web - and perhaps a new world of standards between connected devices, physical things, etc. will be a much richer place than a document-centric world. It's merely an idea, not a statement against openness.
- quanticle 13y agoWe want to be encouraging the web because it's open. The web is accessible, in one way or another, from any device capable of displaying HTML. Apps are not. I don't want to live in a world where content is balkanized between iPads, Android tablets, Surfaces, and whatever other platforms may arise in the future.
- GeneralMayhem 13y agoThe big thing that the Web provides that apps don't is the ability to move smoothly from one page to another. Apps live in their own silos most of the time, and provide an extra barrier to use in that you have to specifically download and install that one app in order to run it. You would need something like a browser that masks the download process like it does for Web pages. Then you're left with Web pages that spawn independent, standalone programs. Flash, anyone? Of course it's possible (and likely) that something completely different will be invented, but I don't think individual apps for everything that's currently a site is the answer.
- 7952 13y agoI am not sure why the division between apps and the web is even a useful one. What is the difference between a tab in my browser and an app on my taskbar? The app was likely downloaded from the web and sends/receives data from the web. The difference is how it caches data; which has always had a huge impact on user experience. The most important thing is to find better ways of synchronising data between a user machines and the web. It should be possible to download a complete document as a file, use a web cache to render it, and then submit edits to the cloud as a diff. The user shouldn't need to worry if this is happening locally or not.