Comment by rektide
3 years ago
This would not be the web. Why have a browser at all here? It would be a bunch of bitmaps on the screen.
There's 0 user agency to this scheme.
Developers (some) might enjoy this but this is bad for humankind. A garbage fire of Flash, forever & ever. Un-web. Having no high level interfaces to stand upon, using the web as a low level pixel-out target is the worst look a web company could propose, is deeply betraying to one of the only technological projects that has expanded human liberty. This is a horrible mis-step in the technosocial society.
And the intro sections attempt to malign seems intense weak sauce. "Quirky" feels like mostly works pretty great, for a huge huge number of the largest rank of developers- web developers. But oh no, visual centering is hard! Burn it down! Oh no there are some oddly named input gestures (which?), burn it down! Based off the proliferation of design systems (& having worked on a few), styling components is not on my list of complaints at all. I think many working developers handle what we have fine & are not nearly as restrained or encumbered as this slander puts-down.
This feels like an elite concern & self-justification that is unhinged from the real world. Where do developers sign up to say they dont have the awful terrible miserable forsaken life this post declares to be our conditions, needing total revolution?
The harm is just so great; blowing up our shared language to turn the web into a low level platform for pixels. This is the fall of information-society Babel, a fools quest, of ruin. Scattering us to many totally unique utterly unrelated development platforms, none of which have any power any web-extensions, any user scripting. This is a control technology, slams the door on the holistic better nature of the web, and that is an awful plight to perpetrate against the user, a sad & dark leaving of a bright information society to head into the Dark Forest of computing. What is the meat, what justifies this attempt to kill structured hypermedia & replace the world wide web with a web of bitmaps?
*hugs*
Was pretty surprising to me seeing you embrace the Flutter/CanvasKit plan, take it as a good prototype & support furthering this. The web has always seemed so rich in virtue & principle, gives us so much, and I always would have assumed you saw & got some of that, some of the worth & dignity of the web endeavour. This feels reaching for something so utterly & different & opposed to that shared medium we have, and I cant comprehend how dark one's perception must be to walk the path of abandoning a shared medium for structure-less freeform running code.
I just wish I saw any hope for an standard or interoperability, saw this as a starting point for better or more inter-networking of systems, which has been one of the most brilliant & faith-building-in-humanity things I've been so fortunate to experience the rise of, has been so inspirational. The web has been so obviously & clearly better than everything else in computing by being a medium, has so many virtues by being just self-modylifying documents. It has been stunningly inspirational.
By compare, this feels like walking into the dark. There is no medium of exchange here; just a screen with bitmaps. I want to have some at least vague sense that someone other than developers would be enhanced by a supplantative would-be-media like what is proposed here, want to imagine some real core connective substance that is at least as good as what we have.
I dont see any cognizance or respect from very good long standing web folk like yourself that this kind of effort has huge downsides and risk to users. Rather than everyone sharing a same web kernel, any developer can build their own app kernel & reinvent everything... it's bold & powerful an idea, and I struggle enormously to say (so very conservatively): no, this is a frontier we should not explore. I cherish exploration so much. But this doesnt seem like a medium to me, it doesnt seem like it's anything aside from giving everything we have & share up completely, to embrace a path of starting from nothing, and this time having no common interchange to work forward together with. Users having not a rich document, but just having a shitty low grade unintelligible illegible mess: having only running code. The idea of that, to me, resembles an attack, against the web, against the idea of inter-networking, and against people.
Hugs back Hixie, holy frelling frak!
I think my attitude to this stuff evolved after seeing that even with all the work we did with HTML, virtually nobody actually benefits from it.
In theory, HTML is device independent. In practice, we can't even get web apps to work on desktop and mobile, to the point where even sites like Wikipedia, the simplest and most obvious place where HTML should Just Work across devices, has a whole fricking separate subdomain for mobile.
In theory, HTML gives users ultimate control over presentation. In practice, after _years_ of trying to make alternate style sheets a reality, not a single browser in common use even has a UI for them. Nobody cares. A few people with extensions might occasionally make some minor tweak, but that's about it.
In theory, HTML is accessible. In practice, despite decades of advocacy, basic sites fail utterly to be accessible even for basic things because people ignore all of HTML's semantics, they just bolt things together to work for the common sighted able-bodied user and then, _if they are paid enough_, they _might_ just slap on some ARIA attributes to make it vaguely work for people with accessibility tools.
If HTML was all the things we wanted it to be, we designed it to be, if reality actually matched the fantasies we tell ourselves in working group meetings, then mobile apps wouldn't be written once for iOS and once for Android and then once again for desktop web, they'd be written once, in HTML, and that's what everyone would use. You wouldn't have an app store, you'd have the web. You wouldn't follow a link on your phone only to have it redirect to a locally-installed non-web application, it would just stay in your browser. Developers are scrambling to get out of the web and into the mobile app stores.
The reality is that for all of the work that we've put into HTML, and CSS, and the DOM, it has fundamentally utterly failed to deliver on its promise.
It's even worse than that, actually, because all of the things we've built aren't just not doing what we want, they're holding developers back. People build their applications on frameworks that _abstract out_ all the APIs we build for browsers, and _even with those frameworks_ developers are hamstrung by weird limitations of the web.
The parts of the web that have actually delivered are the ephemerality and the security model, the indexability (but only for content, not apps), deep linkability, and the platform-independence. We can keep all those, and throw out the decades of legacy that's holding us back, and we will lose nothing, we will only gain as we unleash the kinds of amazing interfaces that developers can build when you give them the raw bedrock APIs that other platforms already give their developers.
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