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And you would never use it for anything besides reading documents.

jrockway 17y ago
Or buying things online, or posting to Twitter, etc. AJAX is nice for building applications, but very few applications need total interactivity. I can't think of any AJAX-y web application I actually use, other than ones I've written. All of my web browsing is fine with the latency of a page load.
- stanleydrew 17y ago
  What about voting on HN? Would be pretty annoying to reload the page after every vote no?
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Just middle-click to open the "your vote was counted" in a new tab. But anyway, having Javascript in your browser is not what makes it bloated; Emacs had an embeddable programming language many years before anyone even thought to embed Javascript in a web browser. It is quirks mode + the DOM + bad programming. (Bad programming == using raw C++. A few years ago, Firefox used a lot of memory because of heap fragmenentation. Garbage collection or double-indirection pointers would easily have solved that problem.)
    - stanleydrew 17y ago
      OK fair enough. But bad programming by browser makers has nothing to do with the markup used for web-pages, which is what you were praising with BH's homepage. Quirks mode also has nothing to do with markup and everything to do with browser makers' failure to implement w3c css standards. And wasn't the DOM developed to accommodate demands for client side scripting such as javascript. So two of the things you cite as contributing to bloat have nothing to do with page design, and without the third (the DOM) we'd give up a lot of client-side scripting functionality, which is exactly the functionality I am arguing isn't worth giving up.
    - JoachimSchipper 17y ago
      "Thanks to the joint efforts of OpenOffice, Mozilla, and a few others, Emacs officially entered the category of lightweight utilities." -- http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8224&cid=709073 http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8224&cid=709073
      - jrockway 17y ago
        Hilarious. C programs are bloated when you consider the C library and UNIX environment they require.
  - borism 17y ago
    meh? click on up/down vote button -> GET/POST -> displays a comments page with recounted votes at the location of your comment you still need to reload to see other people's votes even with today's fancy ajax voting!
    - jrockway 17y ago
      "Fancy" is not the word to describe HN's AJAX voting. "Minimally functional" is closer.
    - mhansen 17y ago
      If other comments had been posted, you would lose your place. Also, the screen flash would interrupt reading. Not to mention, some people don't have superfast broadband.
borism 17y ago
Yeah, there was no eBay, no Amazon, no Excite, no Hotmail, no Viaweb etc. before Web 2.0 came.
- stanleydrew 17y ago
  I guess it depends on how you interpret "like this" in the original post. The things you cite above are nothing at all like the BH homepage.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Check out the original versions of those sites. They look exactly like the current BH page.
    - stanleydrew 17y ago
      I wasn't suggesting they don't look similar. You'll notice I didn't say that. I think it's obvious that those sites offered a level of interactivity that the current BH page does not though, so I feel like you're being a little disingenuous here. I guess I'm not clear on what you meant in your original post then. Did you mean that If the web consisted of the pages that were around in 1997 we wouldn't have weekly security updates and 600K memory-hog browsers? Or did you mean that if people designed web-pages to be informational and not interactive we wouldn't have those problems? I interpreted your comment as the latter, but I would take issue with both. In the end my problem with your comment is that it's a lot like saying "If we didn't have email, we wouldn't have spam" or "If cars didn't have windows, it would be harder to break into them." It just seems like silly nostalgia. I suppose I should have articulated this more clearly from the beginning.
- potatolicious 17y ago
  I work for one of the above - you have no idea how much functionality we wouldn't be able to have (or at least wouldn't be reasonably easy to use) without "Web 2.0".
  - 17y ago
rwmj 17y ago
Uh huh, and that's bad how?
- stanleydrew 17y ago
  It's not bad. But I wouldn't want to give up the applications that have made my life far more efficient due to their being hosted and universally available in a web-browser. Obviously Gmail is the big one here.
vsync 17y ago
You say that like you think it's a bad thing.

Or buying things online, or posting to Twitter, etc. AJAX is nice for building applications, but very few applications need total interactivity. I can't think of any AJAX-y web application I actually use, other than ones I've written. All of my web browsing is fine with the latency of a page load.

stanleydrew 17y ago
What about voting on HN? Would be pretty annoying to reload the page after every vote no?
- jrockway 17y ago
  Just middle-click to open the "your vote was counted" in a new tab. But anyway, having Javascript in your browser is not what makes it bloated; Emacs had an embeddable programming language many years before anyone even thought to embed Javascript in a web browser. It is quirks mode + the DOM + bad programming. (Bad programming == using raw C++. A few years ago, Firefox used a lot of memory because of heap fragmenentation. Garbage collection or double-indirection pointers would easily have solved that problem.)
  - stanleydrew 17y ago
    OK fair enough. But bad programming by browser makers has nothing to do with the markup used for web-pages, which is what you were praising with BH's homepage. Quirks mode also has nothing to do with markup and everything to do with browser makers' failure to implement w3c css standards. And wasn't the DOM developed to accommodate demands for client side scripting such as javascript. So two of the things you cite as contributing to bloat have nothing to do with page design, and without the third (the DOM) we'd give up a lot of client-side scripting functionality, which is exactly the functionality I am arguing isn't worth giving up.
  - JoachimSchipper 17y ago
    "Thanks to the joint efforts of OpenOffice, Mozilla, and a few others, Emacs officially entered the category of lightweight utilities." -- http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8224&cid=709073 http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8224&cid=709073
    - jrockway 17y ago
      Hilarious. C programs are bloated when you consider the C library and UNIX environment they require.
- borism 17y ago
  meh? click on up/down vote button -> GET/POST -> displays a comments page with recounted votes at the location of your comment you still need to reload to see other people's votes even with today's fancy ajax voting!
  - jrockway 17y ago
    "Fancy" is not the word to describe HN's AJAX voting. "Minimally functional" is closer.
  - mhansen 17y ago
    If other comments had been posted, you would lose your place. Also, the screen flash would interrupt reading. Not to mention, some people don't have superfast broadband.

borism 17y ago

Yeah, there was no eBay, no Amazon, no Excite, no Hotmail, no Viaweb etc. before Web 2.0 came.

stanleydrew 17y ago
I guess it depends on how you interpret "like this" in the original post. The things you cite above are nothing at all like the BH homepage.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Check out the original versions of those sites. They look exactly like the current BH page.
  - stanleydrew 17y ago
    I wasn't suggesting they don't look similar. You'll notice I didn't say that. I think it's obvious that those sites offered a level of interactivity that the current BH page does not though, so I feel like you're being a little disingenuous here. I guess I'm not clear on what you meant in your original post then. Did you mean that If the web consisted of the pages that were around in 1997 we wouldn't have weekly security updates and 600K memory-hog browsers? Or did you mean that if people designed web-pages to be informational and not interactive we wouldn't have those problems? I interpreted your comment as the latter, but I would take issue with both. In the end my problem with your comment is that it's a lot like saying "If we didn't have email, we wouldn't have spam" or "If cars didn't have windows, it would be harder to break into them." It just seems like silly nostalgia. I suppose I should have articulated this more clearly from the beginning.
potatolicious 17y ago
I work for one of the above - you have no idea how much functionality we wouldn't be able to have (or at least wouldn't be reasonably easy to use) without "Web 2.0".
- 17y ago

rwmj 17y ago

Uh huh, and that's bad how?

stanleydrew 17y ago
It's not bad. But I wouldn't want to give up the applications that have made my life far more efficient due to their being hosted and universally available in a web-browser. Obviously Gmail is the big one here.

vsync 17y ago

You say that like you think it's a bad thing.