Comment by IgorPartola
5 months ago
That’s a flame war that’s been raging for decades for sure.
I do wonder what web application markup would look like today if designed from scratch. It is kind of amazing that HTML and CSS can be used for creating beautiful documents viewable on pretty much any device with a screen AND also for creating dynamic applications with pixel-perfect rendering, special effects, integrations with the device’s hardware, and even external peripherals.
If there was ever scope creep in a project this would be it. And given the recent discussion on here of curses based interfaces it reminded me just how primitive other GUI application layout tools can be while still achieving amazing results. Even something like GTK does not need the intense level of layout engine support and yet is somehow considered richer in some ways and probably more performant for a lot of stuff that’s done with it.
So I am curious what web application development would look like today if it wasn’t for HTML being “good enough”.
Had we had better process isolation in the mid-90s, I assume web application development would mostly be Java apps, with a mini-vm for each one (sort of a qubes like environment).
We just couldn't keeps apps' hands out of the cookie jar back then.
Java tried to, and mostly successfully did, run trusted and untrusted code in the same VM. Your applet code ran in the same VM as all the code for managing applets. However, holes were frequent enough that they abandoned the whole idea. (Instead of sandboxing the VM as a whole? Why?)
The whole applet thing was already slow enough then without scrutinizing every syscall it makes.
Well we had flash. It wasn't great. Or it wasn't great enough to keep around without a major browser or OS provider pushing it.
I will remind you that Swing sucked, hard in the 1990s. And HTML was pretty easy to write.
If a browser was designed from scratch today it wouldn't have a markup language, documents would be PDF and everything else would be Javascript to canvas.
Suggesting something like HTML would have you laughed out of the room.
If it were designed from scratch by BigTech anyway. Rather than JS I'd guess it would be WASM with APIs for canvas and accessibility. JS would go via WASM just like any other language you might prefer. If you asked about HTML you'd get pointed at the relevant render-to-canvas library in the language of your choice.
This is only the case because the BigTech view is one of an application platform.