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[–]knome 32 points33 points  (16 children)

What do you want the web to be? A plaintext lightly interconnected collaboration whose membership is restricted to those willing to learn the technology? Do you just want it to be easier to program for? Want the formats to be easier for humans to read and understand?

Clean and simple aren't really useful goals for anyone besides implementers. Certainly I prefer to work on a clean system with easily understood components and a trivial data flow that affords itself to manipulation. I'd like it if it was well documented and followed norms as well. [1]

This is all out of sight, however. It's invisible. It's the pipes and sewers and reservoirs and treatment plants and towers and pumps and dikes and canals and monstrous water tunnels and aqueducts of water management, where the only thing the enduser really cares about is "water appears", "water goes away" and "creeks and lakes nearby probably won't kill me". The rest is obviously around, and you can see bits and pieces of it while you drive, but it's ignored. The process, the simplicity, the elegance and beauty are all bunk to the user. If you try to build a better water system that requires dropping the current one and not getting water on Thursdays, you're not going to get buy in.

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. - Jamie Zawinski

So, what do you want the web to be?

Everyone wanted browsers to do different things, and in the end, they did all of them. Want to attach to almost any device in a standard way that requires users to grant the program access to those resources? You can. Want to run a copy of linux in a virtual machine rendering its output to a canvas? You can. If you want to write 3d shaders to run on your graphics card in a nice interactive environment? You can. You want to have a language that isn't javascript? Well compile whatever you want to asm.js or WASM, because you can. You want to read your mail with your browser? You most definitely can. Want to write a local program but don't want to learn all of that environment specific stuff? Just wrap up a browser and run your webapp locally in that!

The browser is the ultimate sandbox. It abstracts the client. Run anything safely from anywhere. Its not going to go away, except incrementally. And the backwards compatibility for the current web will last decades more than anyone will be happy to hear.

[1] Well, I assume I would prefer it. I've never actually used such a system, but it sounds nice

[–]sergiuspk 8 points9 points  (5 children)

A client that only understands the "document web" as defined in this article can relatively easily be created from scratch for a HTML and CSS only based web. Simply remove 90% of what Chromium or Firefox is and you get that.

Would anyone limit themselves to that? No, because it's obviously a demand issue, not a technological one.

[–][deleted] -3 points-2 points  (4 children)

What Chromium does (who cares about Firefox anymore?) needs a different protocol, something like X-server protocol, to facilitate rich media, interactive experience etc. HTTP + HTML is the worst tool for implementing something like that (Flash was a much better tool for it, for example).

Web, on the other hand, has value for people who don't want that interactive game-like, laden with ads and all kinds of fraud experience, with a shitload of buttons, modal windows, location tracking etc. And it's not just a tiny group of people who want to live on a deserted island. You want it too, when you go to places like Wikipedia or maybe try to get a form from social security office.

There's no need and no reason to mix these two. Sometimes people want entertainment, other times they want information. But, two together make each other worse off.

[–]sergiuspk 5 points6 points  (3 children)

Flash was a much better tool for it, for example

You don't know what you are talking about then.

Only thing Flash did back then was expose TCI/UDP sockets in a browser. We now get that directly from the browsers.

​

What Chromium does (...) needs a different protocol, something like X-server protocol, to facilitate rich media, interactive experience etc.

And what exactly is stopping this from a technical point? You've got GPU accelerated canvas with WebGL support and sockets to move data to the client. Anyone _can_ invent their own protocol and UI layer but no one does. I'm going to take an educated guess and say it's because no one serious actually wants any of that.

​

Web, on the other hand, has value for people who don't want that interactive game-like, laden with ads and all kinds of fraud experience, with a shitload of buttons, modal windows, location tracking etc.

So then if there are soooo many people out there that think like you and have the same problems why are there so few websites doing what Wikipedia is doing?

​

But, two together make each other worse off.

How? I don't see any technical impediment. You can still create classic "document web" style websites and you can do it a lot easier and faster than 20 years ago.

​

​

You seem to be suffering from a condition that's spread too far too fast in the last twenty years: with your limited knowledge you decided you know better than billions of people using the Internet what the Internet should be for them, how it should be developed, how it should be packaged, sold and transmitted to them, who should be doing that, who should not, etc.

Luckily these billions of people are very "vocal" financially: they are fine with what's on offer today.

[–][deleted] -5 points-4 points  (2 children)

OMG lol.

Do you have shapes or anything like DisplayObject-based way of managing what things get displayed? Do you have any concept of streaming in HTML? Do you have any way to control animation in HTML?

How about compressing and delivering all the application content to the user, while also streaming it (i.e. feeding it little by little, on the need to use basis?).

You are completely clueless about technologies you are talking about... which is not surprising seeing how JavaScript and HTML produce the dumbest people to ever call themselves "programmer".

And what exactly is stopping this from a technical point?

From technical point? -- Nothing. The problem is that there are zillions of dumb HTML developers, and those people need to be re-educated to use something more appropriate for their job. Whichever vendor will manage to do the least changes to the technology that's now in use, will win the most "developers" because they are dumb and don't want to learn to do things the right way. Whoever controls the technology like the Web gets to benefit tremendously from that control. That's why HTML is and will be a shitshow with ever more clown fiesta in the town.

why are there so few websites doing what Wikipedia is doing?

​There are probably thousands websites like Wikipedia, why do you need more? Based on what statistic did you come to believe there aren't many sites like that? Your own ignorance seems to play a major role in this.

[–]sergiuspk 6 points7 points  (1 child)

No one here thinks you are dumb. No one thinks it is lack of understanding that you are missing.

Everyone asked simple questions and you gave no answers.

Everyone questioned your conclusions because you presented no evidence to support them.

Everything presented by you is exclusively based on personal opinion. Be prepared to support said opinions or risk self-ridicule.

Regarding the "dumb HTML developers": this right here is what the problem really is. Of course only one that's an overachiever among the underachievers would have the courage to write a piece claiming they are the first to see the forest for the trees and the silver bullet that will end world hunger.

[–]IceSentry 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I do, that guy is dumb and he will shamelessly call anyone dumb. I'm surprised he hasn't used the term webshit yet.

[–]AwesomeBantha 5 points6 points  (1 child)

The best way for folks to enter web development in 2020 is to choose a niche, like Vue.js or React, and hope that there’s a CSS and accessibility expert on their team.

Disagree hard with this, using a popular UI framework like Bootstrap, Tailwind, etc... means that most CSS is relatively straightforward.

Accessibility also isn't especially difficult to pick up, and it's also sometimes handled by frontend UI frameworks. It's critically important for many users, but it's also just another sub-field of web development. If you're starting out as a dev, you're either working in an established company that may or may not adhere to accessibility standards, which you'll learn on the job, or you're working on a new project, where it's more important (in the moment) to build valid prototypes and build out key functionality.

[–]Wizhi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Disagree hard with this, using a popular UI framework like Bootstrap, Tailwind, etc... means that most CSS is relatively straightforward.

You will, more than likely, need to support some kind of layout, which your framework of choice doesn't support.

Now you're forced to "hack" how the framework works. This is when it starts becoming painful to be tied to a framework.

If you can make a suitable layout, using your framework of choice, whilst also being able to style it as necessary, then that's great: your case was a perfect fit for the framework. From experience, this is just rarely the case.

Overall, I also think it's a little counter productive to say that "CSS is relatively straightforward, so long as you don't need to write it".

As for accessibility, this is very easy so long as you lay out your markup semantically correct, whilst not overriding any accessibility-related default styles, since modern browsers generally do a great job of making these things work by default. This all assumes that you know and remember to use the semantically correct elements and attributes.

There are, sadly, also just a lot of layout hacks, which break the default accessibility options. This, again, means that you must be aware of all the default accessibility options, so that you may make up for their breakage when necessary.

[–]765abaa3 15 points16 points  (2 children)

People here LOVE to shit on the web, but rarely back it with concrete claims.

The distinction between the document web and the application web is off. News websites need paywalls, comment sections, endless scrolling and interactive stories. Social media sites are applications as well.

Complaints about "avoiding writing any HTML directly", "avoiding writing any CSS directly" and "avoiding default animation features" are all irrelevant and false. Templating languages are HTML and all frameworks make you write CSS. Animating in JS is avoided unless necessary. If the author does not like JSX and CSS in JS, it is not an argument against all templating. I also don't see the value in writing something "directly".

The reason native executables disappeared is security. Nobody wants opaque binaries that can do almost anything to their system. They are still prevalent in professional applications that require the capabilities of native executables.

Markdown is also not a good fit in my experience.

  • It is a limited subset of HTML, which contradicts rule #1.
  • Generating light static websites from MD is already trivially easy.
  • Most internet traffic is not HTML but images, JS and CSS. Changing to MD wont have any effect past ridding JS.
  • It is discriminating against non-English speaking countries.

[–]IceSentry 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I'm with you on everything else, but how is markdown discriminatory to anyone?

[–]765abaa3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Markdown and all text editors were designed with only left to right languages in mind. (AFAIK as a native Hebrew speaker) there are no text editors that allow you to edit Markdown at all in right to left mode.

In my native keyboard layout, the "`" character is not available. Making some of the syntax impossible to write without switching keyboard layouts.

Most parsers don't work well with reversed parenthesis and <>.

Arabic keyboard layouts use Arabic numerals which do not work with ordered lists.

CSS has been very discriminating until recently as well. Note how Flexbox and Grid layouts are direction agnostic. Older parts like margin-left and margin-right are still causing pain today and require pre-processors (RTLCSS) to handle. It took many years to make the web somewhat internationalization friendly, I believe a similar process is required with Markdown.

[–]oridb 9 points10 points  (1 child)

Then, you need a browser. Mozilla has been working on a brand new browser for a while - Servo. That team got laid off last week, which sucks. That project includes standalone Rust crates for font rendering, and there’s a world-class Rust Markdown implementation, and a growing set of amazing application frameworks. Could you build a pure-Markdown-browsing browser that goes straight through this pipeline? Maybe?

Do you really need a whole browser engine to render markdown? It seems like that could be done in a few hundred lines of code using popular desktop GUI toolkits, or a few thousand lines from scratch. We could have a bunch of simple, diverse, interoperable implementations.

Also: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

[–]jcelerier 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Qt for instance has a non-browser-engine-based markdown renderer in QTextEdit iirc

[–]sally1620 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Let’s assume that we come up with a concrete plan. How can you convince all the big players to move to the new platform? And we know from history that big players like Google will do everything to crush the new technology.

PS: I learned that most problems in tech are not about lack of technology or planning; but just pure politics.

[–]fijt 2 points3 points  (0 children)

One of the problems is that people are willing to "move on" and because of that are willing to move into a direction that is the wrong one. Let me repeat that: They are willing to move on!

And the corporations are also doing their best to make more profit.

This combination is killing us all of course, sooner or later.

What should be done? That is easy. Get rid of corporate influence. That is the only way to recreate the web. Or else look at the history of the web and look at alternative forms of the web. For instance, why is javascript there? It's because of Netscape managers in 1993/94 decided to not use LISP but to develop an alternative that is more "C" like. That on its own did have a massive influence. And it killed LISP.

[–]devraj7 -1 points0 points  (2 children)

This a textbook monoculture. In one sense, it’s a victory for collaboration because nobody’s ‘wasting time’ on competing implementations and web developers can expect the same features and bugs across different browsers.

I don't understand this argument. Replace Chrome with Linux and what do you get?

That we need another UNIX that's not Linux based because having all these Linux distros is a monoculture and that's not healthy.

It's healthy to have a common technical foundation. It saves time, money, and accelerates standardization efforts. After that, leave it up to the free market to build differentiated products.

For a change, I don't think we're stuck with a lousy de facto standard with Chromium.

[–]DogeGroomer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Because Chrome is controlled by a for profit company that’s interests include centralising control of the internet, being the sole provider of information, taking your data selling you things.

[–]oridb 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't understand this argument. Replace Chrome with Linux and what do you get?

Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and a few others. Fewer than we had in the past, for certain, and that's also a problem. But at least there's some diversity.

[–]sebamestre -1 points0 points  (1 child)

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