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Empirical evidence or simply history? The web started as a platform on bigger devices which were stationary and a bit too far away to touch - of course it still

by leoedin 13y ago

Empirical evidence or simply history? The web started as a platform on bigger devices which were stationary and a bit too far away to touch - of course it still works best on those platforms. However, "The web" is simply a stack made up (at the client end) of HTML/CSS for layout and javascript for logic. Nothing more, nothing less. Both of those technologies are entirely screen resolution, power source and interaction method independent (with the exception maybe of the aspects of javascript which relate to mouse pointers). There's no reason that websites can't be built from the ground up for mobile devices. The reason that "the web" (according to your empirical evidence) doesn't work for mobile devices is because the vast majority of the web wasn't designed for mobile devices. Mobile browsers are still mostly dealing with sites designed for 4x the screen size and designed with very little thought for client side execution time. Many popular "native" apps use web technologies (HTML/CSS and javascript) in a way which you wouldn't even know wasn't native - the reason it works is because the markup and JS are targeted towards mobile devices rather than desktop browsers.

Zigurd 13y ago
> There's no reason that websites can't be built from the ground up for mobile devices. This is true in principle, so let's see if my theory holds up when generalized to other pre-touch stacks: Windows? Failed at repeated attempts to touchify. Linux/BSD? Only systems where the whole app runtime was replaced succeeded at being touchified. I think that points to a future where, if the Web is to work on touch mobile devices, there has to emerge a consensus around a manageable handful of frameworks with common UX conventions, and apps have to use one of those frameworks. But even then, native mobile platforms are evolving ahead of Web frameworks. Android's Fragment and ActionBar classes enable UIs to "fold up" and "unfold" across a range of screen sizes. That's part of the expected Android UX now. Capturing that, or creating an alternative UX accepted by the same user base, in any cross-platform system is going to be difficult.
- leoedin 13y ago
  You clearly have very little understanding of the technologies you're discussing. HTML/CSS is a presentation layer which describes a way of drawing things on a screen. Nothing more. To compare it to Windows is tenuous, and to suggest that "Linux" even has a standard "app runtime" suggests a clear misunderstanding of the Linux ecosystem. Web technologies are a layer below what Android or other mobile platforms expose to developers. They're a platform upon which frameworks can build. I agree that a few frameworks providing UI widgets and allowing easy layout will emerge (as they have in, for example, Bootstrap). I disagree that you can in any way generalise by saying "the web is for desktops" simply because of the history it has.

by leoedin 13y ago

Zigurd 13y ago

> There's no reason that websites can't be built from the ground up for mobile devices. This is true in principle, so let's see if my theory holds up when generalized to other pre-touch stacks: Windows? Failed at repeated attempts to touchify. Linux/BSD? Only systems where the whole app runtime was replaced succeeded at being touchified. I think that points to a future where, if the Web is to work on touch mobile devices, there has to emerge a consensus around a manageable handful of frameworks with common UX conventions, and apps have to use one of those frameworks. But even then, native mobile platforms are evolving ahead of Web frameworks. Android's Fragment and ActionBar classes enable UIs to "fold up" and "unfold" across a range of screen sizes. That's part of the expected Android UX now. Capturing that, or creating an alternative UX accepted by the same user base, in any cross-platform system is going to be difficult.

leoedin 13y ago
You clearly have very little understanding of the technologies you're discussing. HTML/CSS is a presentation layer which describes a way of drawing things on a screen. Nothing more. To compare it to Windows is tenuous, and to suggest that "Linux" even has a standard "app runtime" suggests a clear misunderstanding of the Linux ecosystem. Web technologies are a layer below what Android or other mobile platforms expose to developers. They're a platform upon which frameworks can build. I agree that a few frameworks providing UI widgets and allowing easy layout will emerge (as they have in, for example, Bootstrap). I disagree that you can in any way generalise by saying "the web is for desktops" simply because of the history it has.