4 ms·

The entire posts reads like an old man complaining about kids on his lawn. The justification is just .. dumb. First because the debate is over. People want to

The entire posts reads like an old man complaining about kids on his lawn. The justification is just .. dumb. First because the debate is over. People want to build web apps, and they want to consume web apps. You can certainly stay on the side-lines, complain and yearn for the 90s and those glorious days of geocities and 'proper' web pages, but the world has moved on. Second, there is this arbitrary expectation of what the web should be. Who says the people of 1995 got the web completely right?! It's like we should have just ended innovation back in the mid 90s because the pinnacle of perfection has been reached. >As Jeremy points out, a web app seems to be nothing but a web site that requires JavaScript. No, it's not. A web application is an application that runs in the browser (I don't want to debate web page vs web app). We had web applications before Javascript client-side became big, except everything was rendered on the server, and required reloads for most state changes. It was a largely a shitty experience. It was shitty for developers who had to write it, and shitty for users, who had to use it. But still, it conveyed huge benefits over corresponding installed applications. Your quintessential web-app back in the day was web-mail. The original vision of HTML as only hyper-linked document markup probably lasted all of a year before we began abusing it to build things outside of the original scope. >Perhaps we could go a step further and share the whitelists and blacklists. Definitely within the ethos of the web.

jeff558 13y ago
Actually, people positively DO NOT want to "consume web apps". They just want something that works and is convenient. Thanks to every other platform being highly anti-competitive, the web platform has edged them out. It's a shame though, because web apps are generally mediocre garbage running on a deeply flawed, slow, largely insecure platform worked on by barely-competent hipsters.
marrs 13y ago
The justification is just .. dumb. Arrogant, unnecessary opening. Your reasons had better be good. First because the debate is over. Clearly it isn't. People want to build web apps, and they want to consume web apps. "People" don't want to build anything; it's devs who want to do that. People want to do all kinds of things on the web. Often, they want to spend as little time on your site as possible so they can get back to whatever they were doing before. They want consistency, predictability, familiarity. They want their browser to work the same on your site as it does any other site they visit. We had the same debate with Flash. All designers loved it and couldn't help but do "cool" stuff with it. The general public mostly just complained that it was annoying and didn't work as expected. You can certainly stay on the side-lines, complain and yearn for the 90s and those glorious days of geocities and 'proper' web pages, but the world has moved on. Hmm, were you blowing a raspberry as you wrote that ...I see the next point is more hand waving... >As Jeremy points out, a web app seems to be nothing but a web site that requires JavaScript. No, it's not. A web application is an application that runs in the browser And this is why you don't get it. There is no binary here, it's a continuum. The kind of web app you're talking about is the kind of site that would require JS and the kind of site that the author would whitelist. Incidentally, it's also the kind of site I write for a living. Those aren't the sites the author is talking about.
- macspoofing 13y ago
  >"People" don't want to build anything; it's devs who want to do that. +1 for pedantry. Apparently devs aren't people, they are "people" (or is it the other way around). >People want to do all kinds of things on the web. That's right. They want to do all kinds of things on it. They want to hang out on facebook, check gmail, keep track of twitter feed, write documents in google docs, and upload to flickr. All those "web sites" really stretch the original vision of what HTML was supposed to be, and what the author is arguing for. They are all JavaScript heavy not because Devs love JavaScript (it's a shitty language), but because it's the only way to provide a proper experience for the end-users. >We had the same debate with Flash. We didn't have the same 'debate', because there's no debate. End-users aren't complaining about the current state of the web. Devs aren't complaining either. There's no movement to push the web in the other direction. Users, developers and all major internet corporations are pretty much aligned. Most of the focus is on things like privacy, not on reducing the use of JavaScritpt. >There is no binary here, it's a continuum Actually I purposely used "application" because I wanted to reinforce the point that some things that run in the browser are applications, not pages, not marked up documents, applications. Furthermore those web applications may not necessarily require javascript - that's how they are written today, that's not how they were written yesterday. If you want to go into a debate as to what the difference between a 'web site' and a 'web app' is, I'd say there's a continuum there, but I focused on pure "web applications". >The kind of web app you're talking about is the kind of site that would require JS and the kind of site that the author would whitelist. Are you sure about that?
  - marrs 13y ago
    Yes. Try browsing the web without JS enabled for a while and see how many regular sites (not apps) just fail to work. And I don't mean a JS enhancement fails to work; I mean the whole site fails to work, or even load.

jeff558 13y ago

Actually, people positively DO NOT want to "consume web apps". They just want something that works and is convenient. Thanks to every other platform being highly anti-competitive, the web platform has edged them out. It's a shame though, because web apps are generally mediocre garbage running on a deeply flawed, slow, largely insecure platform worked on by barely-competent hipsters.

marrs 13y ago

The justification is just .. dumb. Arrogant, unnecessary opening. Your reasons had better be good. First because the debate is over. Clearly it isn't. People want to build web apps, and they want to consume web apps. "People" don't want to build anything; it's devs who want to do that. People want to do all kinds of things on the web. Often, they want to spend as little time on your site as possible so they can get back to whatever they were doing before. They want consistency, predictability, familiarity. They want their browser to work the same on your site as it does any other site they visit. We had the same debate with Flash. All designers loved it and couldn't help but do "cool" stuff with it. The general public mostly just complained that it was annoying and didn't work as expected. You can certainly stay on the side-lines, complain and yearn for the 90s and those glorious days of geocities and 'proper' web pages, but the world has moved on. Hmm, were you blowing a raspberry as you wrote that ...I see the next point is more hand waving... >As Jeremy points out, a web app seems to be nothing but a web site that requires JavaScript. No, it's not. A web application is an application that runs in the browser And this is why you don't get it. There is no binary here, it's a continuum. The kind of web app you're talking about is the kind of site that would require JS and the kind of site that the author would whitelist. Incidentally, it's also the kind of site I write for a living. Those aren't the sites the author is talking about.

macspoofing 13y ago
>"People" don't want to build anything; it's devs who want to do that. +1 for pedantry. Apparently devs aren't people, they are "people" (or is it the other way around). >People want to do all kinds of things on the web. That's right. They want to do all kinds of things on it. They want to hang out on facebook, check gmail, keep track of twitter feed, write documents in google docs, and upload to flickr. All those "web sites" really stretch the original vision of what HTML was supposed to be, and what the author is arguing for. They are all JavaScript heavy not because Devs love JavaScript (it's a shitty language), but because it's the only way to provide a proper experience for the end-users. >We had the same debate with Flash. We didn't have the same 'debate', because there's no debate. End-users aren't complaining about the current state of the web. Devs aren't complaining either. There's no movement to push the web in the other direction. Users, developers and all major internet corporations are pretty much aligned. Most of the focus is on things like privacy, not on reducing the use of JavaScritpt. >There is no binary here, it's a continuum Actually I purposely used "application" because I wanted to reinforce the point that some things that run in the browser are applications, not pages, not marked up documents, applications. Furthermore those web applications may not necessarily require javascript - that's how they are written today, that's not how they were written yesterday. If you want to go into a debate as to what the difference between a 'web site' and a 'web app' is, I'd say there's a continuum there, but I focused on pure "web applications". >The kind of web app you're talking about is the kind of site that would require JS and the kind of site that the author would whitelist. Are you sure about that?
- marrs 13y ago
  Yes. Try browsing the web without JS enabled for a while and see how many regular sites (not apps) just fail to work. And I don't mean a JS enhancement fails to work; I mean the whole site fails to work, or even load.