> I didn't see it as rage. It simply pointed out that the web as it exists is a document format that had self modification, and then full apps bolted on
I dunno, it looked pretty aggressive to me. There was maybe a kernel of fact, but mostly opinion:
> As a platform for developing interactive applications the web is simply terrible.
Many disagree. Many would rather use Electron than native apps & find it nicer.
> There is no good way to develop a UI in HTML/CSS/JS, all attempts to do so rely on layers upon layers of wat are essentially hacks to build something resembling a UI toolkit on top of a document markup language.
I laughed out loud. There were already interactive buttons & form controls from the start. Vanilla JS is fine today. One of the web's strongest suits is that you can take a static page & sprinkle in just a little interactivity, just a little applicationization, if you want. Ultra-thin ultra-simple libraries like Enhance are doing great to provide just a little common shape & definition, tiny code but some norms & practices to adopt. It can be extremely incremental to move from document to application, with very little work at each step. We see what we want to see, and a lot of people want to see it as hard, as hugely complicated, but here's an industry heads down cranking without a ton of internal complaint, plenty of simple ways of doing things, and plenty of people doing fine.
> The result a UI that is unnecessarily complicated and fragile.
Sources wanted. Not all sites are perfect but a huge amount of things work very well. And unlike apps, users have a toolkit of capabilities they can learn & apply everywhere to help them (forward, back, bookmark, share link). Extensions let users go further than apps permit. Again, it's just, like, ya'll's downer opinion, man.
Anyhow, I like your note on hope. A lot. I don't see this ancestor post as having much hope there; it seemed set up to ruin. Trying to identify more constructive opportunities, trying to figure out new architectures we might layer onto the platform: that stuff should be exciting.
One place I lose excitement rapidly though is replacing the web with rendered canvases, as you say here:
> I am hoping that wasm and webgl can bypass html css and js for people who just want to make a webapp.
This is my nightmare. If folks want to do something else, fine, go somewhere else. But don't break the web. Don't break every user agent. Don't break view source, scraping, & accessibility tools. Just because alternate paradigms are succeeding as much as laserdisc doesn't mean they should come in & break the web next. That should be enragening.
The web is for more than pushing pixels into peoples faces. There's some value here, some shared expected experience, & coming in crashing it all because the only stakeholder you can imagine is those who "just want to make a [not-so-web]app" and damn all the rest.
I've had this bone to pick with Flutter, which is doing this imperialistic web takeover plan with CanvasKit, effectively turning the browser into a vnc session for an app. Incredibly hostile & deeply cruel way to snub hypertext & make yourself unintelligible to the rest of the ecosystem.
(The "direct calls into the DOM" wasm desires are going to be a bit chaotic & hurtful to view-source, but we've already made that hard; so ok, fine, and yeah, it is exciting to give people a post-JS web.)
I'd really like to keep both webs, but the reality is that everyone trying to monetize wants an app, and failing that a webapp that is a complete black box. So that is probably the way it will go. I like document only websites for conveying information. Know a lot about X and want to share your knowledge? Make a document. I can see room for some partial interactivity for hands on tutorials, like notebooks. But I don't really want any interactivity on my news sites, sadly they will head for the blackbox model first for the money. For a payment portal, a banking app, a multiplayer videogame, probably even a web ide or chat client, I don't want any document like behavior, I just want an app, and if it can be sandboxed in my browser, all the better.
Ideally I want security sensitive apps to turn into blackbox webapps. I want most everything else to be pure html+css. With interactivity there when you really need it to convey your meaning or to generate documents more quickly.
In reality, I think your nightmare scenario is far more likely. It just makes serving ads so much easier. And they still will keep making native apps for things that should be websites (which is my nightmare) because that makes it even easier to get valuable data.
> I've had this bone to pick with Flutter, which is doing this imperialistic web takeover plan with CanvasKit, effectively turning the browser into a vnc session for an app. Incredibly hostile & deeply cruel way to snub hypertext & make yourself unintelligible to the rest of the ecosystem.
This is nothing new. We used to have Flash, after all. (And I doubt Flutter on web will come close to reaching the ubiquity of that platform.)
Given how the web is embarking a takeover of desktop via Electron and of mobile to a much lesser degree with Ionic, to the annoyance of many users, turnabout is fair play.
I dunno, it looked pretty aggressive to me. There was maybe a kernel of fact, but mostly opinion:
> As a platform for developing interactive applications the web is simply terrible.
Many disagree. Many would rather use Electron than native apps & find it nicer.
> There is no good way to develop a UI in HTML/CSS/JS, all attempts to do so rely on layers upon layers of wat are essentially hacks to build something resembling a UI toolkit on top of a document markup language.
I laughed out loud. There were already interactive buttons & form controls from the start. Vanilla JS is fine today. One of the web's strongest suits is that you can take a static page & sprinkle in just a little interactivity, just a little applicationization, if you want. Ultra-thin ultra-simple libraries like Enhance are doing great to provide just a little common shape & definition, tiny code but some norms & practices to adopt. It can be extremely incremental to move from document to application, with very little work at each step. We see what we want to see, and a lot of people want to see it as hard, as hugely complicated, but here's an industry heads down cranking without a ton of internal complaint, plenty of simple ways of doing things, and plenty of people doing fine.
> The result a UI that is unnecessarily complicated and fragile.
Sources wanted. Not all sites are perfect but a huge amount of things work very well. And unlike apps, users have a toolkit of capabilities they can learn & apply everywhere to help them (forward, back, bookmark, share link). Extensions let users go further than apps permit. Again, it's just, like, ya'll's downer opinion, man.
Anyhow, I like your note on hope. A lot. I don't see this ancestor post as having much hope there; it seemed set up to ruin. Trying to identify more constructive opportunities, trying to figure out new architectures we might layer onto the platform: that stuff should be exciting.
One place I lose excitement rapidly though is replacing the web with rendered canvases, as you say here:
> I am hoping that wasm and webgl can bypass html css and js for people who just want to make a webapp.
This is my nightmare. If folks want to do something else, fine, go somewhere else. But don't break the web. Don't break every user agent. Don't break view source, scraping, & accessibility tools. Just because alternate paradigms are succeeding as much as laserdisc doesn't mean they should come in & break the web next. That should be enragening.
The web is for more than pushing pixels into peoples faces. There's some value here, some shared expected experience, & coming in crashing it all because the only stakeholder you can imagine is those who "just want to make a [not-so-web]app" and damn all the rest.
I've had this bone to pick with Flutter, which is doing this imperialistic web takeover plan with CanvasKit, effectively turning the browser into a vnc session for an app. Incredibly hostile & deeply cruel way to snub hypertext & make yourself unintelligible to the rest of the ecosystem.
(The "direct calls into the DOM" wasm desires are going to be a bit chaotic & hurtful to view-source, but we've already made that hard; so ok, fine, and yeah, it is exciting to give people a post-JS web.)