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The author bemoans overly complex modern web standards, but surely this is an inevitable result of the web's transition from "an easy way to view documents" to

by fenomas 12y ago

The author bemoans overly complex modern web standards, but surely this is an inevitable result of the web's transition from "an easy way to view documents" to "a safe mechanism for remote code execution". I mean sure, in the old days anyone could learn the important HTML tags in a weekend, but they couldn't use those tags to emulate an MS-DOS game. The only way to enable that was to gradually evolve web APIs that safely exposed all the low-level functionality. Or, the only way apart from plugins, anyway. In comments the author writes: > In the future, I suspect some group will do it “right” and create a wonderful plugin or default wrap-in for all browsers that will simply function as the native environment all this material needs. At that point, MESS and DOSBOX will be ported to this... ..which is essentially Flash (which has had solid dynamic audio for years, and console emulators built on it with good audio support (see:nesbox)). In a parallel universe where Flash was an open standard, it'd be exactly what the author is asking for. Except in that universe, Flash would presumably share whatever problems the author finds with web standards. Unless we want to choose One Browser or One Plugin, I'd say we're better off with complicated, slow-moving standards (like Web Audio), even if they are developed and implemented by adversarial companies.

jszymborski 12y ago
I agree... as much as Web Standards and their implementation is suboptimal, I remember a time when you were GUARANTEED that the style and layout you wrote for one browser would simply just not work in any other browser. I don't think people remember how bad it was and how much better it is now. It was like every browser was it's own terrible brand of IE6. Each with their own weirdness that permeated every aspect of the browser. You ended up having to write as many stylesheets as browsers you wanted to support (ok,ok, netscape, firefox and mozilla suite shared the same stylesheet). "Cross-Browser" was as unattainable and desired as the Holy Grail, "This site works best in IE6/Firefox/Opera/Safari" was not a suggestion like "This wine pairs best with cheese" but a warning of terrible consequences like "This milk is best before curdled". Ok, so we're still not 100% cross-browser 100% of the time, but it's a term people don't often need to think about anymore.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  You can chart a history of the Web by what you could reasonably do cross-browser. In the beginning, it was formatted text. That was it. You had bold, underline, italic, and maybe even justification, but images relied on separate helper programs and weren't displayed inline, but in their own windows. And that was assuming the web page and your system had at least one image format in common. (XBM? TIFF? Remember those? I'm not saying they're no longer used, but when was the last time you saw them on the Web?) By the Here Comes Everybody stage, we'd pretty well gotten inline images and even background images sorted, to the limits of color space (256 color is... better than CGA?) and the few format problems left, but fonts certainly didn't transfer and the only music format which was even remotely feasible was MIDI, which is less an audio format and more like sheet music, in that it has to be played by software instruments on your own system. Interesting concept, but no guarantee of sound quality at the receiving end. Skipping a bit, we now have inline images sorted out, fonts sorted out, a workable CSS standard pretty well universal, and even video mostly working, despite the political and legal complications. Now we're annoyed that we can't use our browsers to play games that were written for computers still in use in the Web's early days. 'Progress' is getting annoyed about increasingly interesting and exciting things, it seems.
  - fenomas 12y ago
    True, and it's worth noting that it was only midway through this process that people started expecting different browsers to render pages identically. In the early days HTML merely structured the information; styling was assumed to be left up to user preference.

by fenomas 12y ago

jszymborski 12y ago

I agree... as much as Web Standards and their implementation is suboptimal, I remember a time when you were GUARANTEED that the style and layout you wrote for one browser would simply just not work in any other browser. I don't think people remember how bad it was and how much better it is now. It was like every browser was it's own terrible brand of IE6. Each with their own weirdness that permeated every aspect of the browser. You ended up having to write as many stylesheets as browsers you wanted to support (ok,ok, netscape, firefox and mozilla suite shared the same stylesheet). "Cross-Browser" was as unattainable and desired as the Holy Grail, "This site works best in IE6/Firefox/Opera/Safari" was not a suggestion like "This wine pairs best with cheese" but a warning of terrible consequences like "This milk is best before curdled". Ok, so we're still not 100% cross-browser 100% of the time, but it's a term people don't often need to think about anymore.

cbd1984 12y ago
You can chart a history of the Web by what you could reasonably do cross-browser. In the beginning, it was formatted text. That was it. You had bold, underline, italic, and maybe even justification, but images relied on separate helper programs and weren't displayed inline, but in their own windows. And that was assuming the web page and your system had at least one image format in common. (XBM? TIFF? Remember those? I'm not saying they're no longer used, but when was the last time you saw them on the Web?) By the Here Comes Everybody stage, we'd pretty well gotten inline images and even background images sorted, to the limits of color space (256 color is... better than CGA?) and the few format problems left, but fonts certainly didn't transfer and the only music format which was even remotely feasible was MIDI, which is less an audio format and more like sheet music, in that it has to be played by software instruments on your own system. Interesting concept, but no guarantee of sound quality at the receiving end. Skipping a bit, we now have inline images sorted out, fonts sorted out, a workable CSS standard pretty well universal, and even video mostly working, despite the political and legal complications. Now we're annoyed that we can't use our browsers to play games that were written for computers still in use in the Web's early days. 'Progress' is getting annoyed about increasingly interesting and exciting things, it seems.
- fenomas 12y ago
  True, and it's worth noting that it was only midway through this process that people started expecting different browsers to render pages identically. In the early days HTML merely structured the information; styling was assumed to be left up to user preference.