On Thursday, 18 June 2015 at 18:30:24 UTC, Abdulhaq wrote:
On Thursday, 18 June 2015 at 10:36:16 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Why can't they just admit that the core architecture of the
web is horrific, ie an antiquated document format based on
some shitty 50-year old IBM markup language
(https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Standard_Generalized_Markup_Language), a programming runtime that was cranked out in 10 days in the middle of the browser wars and certainly shows it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Netscape_and_JavaScript), and a stylesheet language hacked on top to eliminate some redundancy, _by adding yet another language_?!
Of course this is exactly true and it drives me mad too, but
you can't just jettison it in favour of a better architecture.
Why not? This is exactly what _should_ be done.
Given that it must be supported else it will break the
interweb, what else is there to do but do but to build the new
stuff on the side. With a canvas, OpenGL backing and a
half-decent 'assembly language' to compile down to, it could be
made into (ultimately) a satisfactory development platform. You
would only need to use DOM and CSS for the top canvas/OpenGL
node and from there down it's all however you want to roll it.
I think the reason these efforts have failed so far is because
NaCl was still stuck using the existing web stack for the GUI,
which is a huge pain. But if you're just going to avoid the old
web stack altogether and try to deploy your canvas/WebGL/assembly
native app everywhere using the web browser as a trojan horse,
presumably just to get through security or evade sysadmins more
easily, you have to question what the point of making it a "web
app" even is.
And this new stuff isn't integrated, I believe canvas doesn't
even support hyperlinks. How is that not broken already?
There appears to be little to no thought put into all these new
APIs that are simply mashed into the browser. A vector graphics
format encoded in text, let alone XML? Yeah, because what I
really wanted to do is read bezier curve descriptions in plain
text interspersed with hundreds of angle brackets and quotation
marks! Throw that in the browser!
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/paths.html
XSLT? Why not?! Throw that shit with libxml in the browser too,
along with all their bugs!
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2010/06/roman-numerals.html
If you didn't read Bray's piece I linked above, his conclusion is
dead on:
"Historical periods featuring rococo engineering outbursts of
colorful duplicative complexity usually end up converging on
something simpler that hits the right 80/20 points."
On Thursday, 18 June 2015 at 18:40:50 UTC, Max Samukha wrote:
On Thursday, 18 June 2015 at 11:00:37 UTC, ketmar wrote:
piles of shit on top of piles of shit
A good definition of evolution.
Except evolution actually weeds out the crap, as Linus knows:
http://bobweigel.net/projects/index.php?title=Weigel/Notes#Linus_on_Development
What we have here is peacocks on some tropical island- only
sustained because all the major browser vendors are now OS
vendors, Apple, Microsoft, Google, who either don't want the web
to replace their OS APIs or have no idea how to make it better-
heading down Bray's "colorful" evolutionary dead-ends before
they're finally wiped out.
