On Saturday, 20 June 2015 at 19:39:06 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
Yes, but would it be better to just have pages and no apps? I
don't think so. When I build an order system it is very useful
to build it like an app.
No, I'm not arguing for pages at all, I'm saying that model is
dead and gone. I think the hyperlink was the killer feature of
the web, but everything else, HTML/CSS/JS, is just detritus
accumulated on top, that needs to be thrown away.
The fact is that networking bandwidth is now so large that you
often can download the catalog for an online shop at once,
compressed it is the size of an image...
You can do some interesting things with caching, sure, but the
web frontend is still unwieldy and slow and round-trip latency
anytime you do something is what kills you.
widgets of AJAX and HTML5, rifts crop up. The recent web
components efforts you highlight do not address this at all,
they merely make it easier to build more dynamic webapps.
It kinda does. Because you can then serve pages with markup
that do things that are specific for the site. When you can
attach behaviour to tags implicitly you get to build your own
markup-language for the site.
Again, none of this helps with the fundamental problem: you are
engineering an app UI layout engine into an old-fashioned
document format. You are always going to be constrained by the
architectural constraints and inefficiency of the document format.
My point was that text makes some sense for the layout of a
document format, but efficiency is key in vector graphics, so
you always want to go binary there.
If the vector graphic is intricate it will take time to render
it. So there is a limit to how much data you want, I don't
think text-transmission is the main issue.
Text compression will get you part of the way to lessening the
bandwidth, but parsing and analyzing the SVG text will always
take longer than if it were binary. I have not actually profiled
an SVG renderer to see where the bottleneck is, but I bet using
text plays a big role.
You can do that if you want. Just download binary data and plot
it to a canvas.
The fact that I could render SVG images to a png and download
that instead doesn't excuse the fact that they're putting full
text SVG renderers into the browser.
But there is no way you could introduce binary SVG when using
SVG dynamically. That would require specialized binary-format
editors for both SVG and HTML. You would basically want binary
HTML too, then.
Of course you could use binary SVG dynamically: you'd simply need
the right hooks in the browser and in the binary format to
manipulate it using javascript. It would not require
"binary-format editors" or "binary HTML."
However, I have long said that they should have tightened up HTML
into a binary format around HTML 3 or so, so that needed to be
done on its own anyway.
On Saturday, 20 June 2015 at 20:31:35 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
An excellent example of this is sites like github that actually
manage to break the "back" button, even though it's *clearly* a
page-based site (that somehow doesn't seem to believe it is).
Heh, you don't know how many times that's hit me. :)
"Smart" TVs also have trouble there:
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2014/07/samsung_smart_t.html
Heh, I have never tried to use a browser on a TV, especially
since I basically haven't watched a TV screen in the last decade,
maybe a couple hours of sports a year. I just download the same
or other online videos and watch them on my computer or mobile
devices.
(See the section "The viewport", just underneath the photo with
a phone held in front of a TV. Erm...speaking of which:
<https://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/html-fragment-linking-is-stupid-here-s-the-fix>)
Hmm, I had not heard of that fragment linking effort you wrote
about. I agree that in the old page model it'd be better if the
user decides what he wants to link to, but in the new dynamic
model, that is very hard to implement.
Pretty soon it won't. :) There are an estimated 2.5 billion
smartphone
users:
http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/07/postmodern-computing/
The highest estimates of desktop and laptop users I've seen
don't crack
2 billion. That means desktops are already a minority
platform.
People have been looking at the sales trends and predicting for
years that mobile will kill of PCs. And all that happened
(unsurprisingly, IMO) is that the decline in PC sales simply
leveled off.
Still declining though, just less than it was:
http://www.asymco.com/2014/07/23/is-the-pc-back/
I'd say this is a temporary respite before the final collapse.
The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because mobile devices
have not worked well with plugging into a large monitor with a
mouse and keyboard, but that is now changing.
Mobile will not, and cannot, replace traditional
laptops/desktops (as opposed to merely cooexisting with them as
is the case right now) until if/when they finally incorporate
all the usability and features of laptops/desktops. Obviously
they're not there right *now* yet. But as for the future...
Sure, but current mobile hardware is about as powerful as
desktop/laptop chips from a year or two ago, which is what most
people are actually running at work:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9289/the-nvidia-shield-android-tv-review/3
At this point, it's just a software issue. Mobile devices just
need UI features like multiwindow to make more capable use of
large desktop monitors.
All
the major mobile vendors are working on multi-window
implementations
which will soon allow you to plug your mobile device into a
dock that
connects to a monitor/keyboard/trackpad on your desk and run
your mobile
apps in a similar way to the desktop: Apple's just-announced
multi-window feature to go along with their coming iPad Pro,
Google's
in-development multi-window implementation that has been found
in the
Android M build, and Microsoft's recently announced Continuum
for mobile
devices, that lets you plug your Windows Phone into a monitor
and use
Office with a desktop UI.
What this means is that people will soon be using their mobile
devices
for almost everything and desktop computers are effectively
dead. :)
Now, workstations were killed off by PCs and they still sell a
couple
million worldwide. Similarly, there will always be a niche
for PCs and
mainframes. It's just a small niche.
I don't think "phones/tablets replacing desktops/laptops" is an
entirely accurate way of describing how that will happen (if it
does). More like "phones/tablets and desktops/laptops will
converge into a hybrid".
Yes and no. As hardware form factors, the old desktop and laptop
models are being ditched. The desktop box will almost completely
disappear, while the folding laptop is only really needed by a
small niche, those for whom "lap-ability" in a plane or
conference seat is needed. I picked up a bluetooth keyboard for
my tablet last year: that suffices for me, and I bet most people,
since I'm always going to put them down on a hard surface before
typing. I bet 97% of the people who currently use laptops are in
this category.
As for the desktop OS, Windows has essentially no penetration on
mobile, while OS X and linux live on only in the core kernels of
their mobile counterparts.
All that is converging is the software UIs, where mobile devices
will be able to display apps appropriately both for constrained
touchscreens and larger monitors controlled by a
keyboard/trackpad. Only in that last sense are mobile devices
converging, by adding software UIs to work on large screens.
Of course, that's dependent on the phone/tablet folks actually
managing to pull it off. Which is certainly a possibility, I
agree, but I'm not convinced they'll necessarily manage to, at
least not in the short term.
It's around the bend and frankly should have been done sooner.
MS, oddly enough, seems to have the highest chance of
succeeding at this, as desktop/mobile convergence has been
their big goal since Win8. And then Win9 (erm, I mean 10)
cleans up some of the mess Win8 left. (Not that I like metro or
what the metro "theme" has done to the desktop side of windows,
even in Win9^H10, but that's beside the point here.)
They certainly seemed to start on it first, but screwed it up in
some key ways. Not allowing the desktop on Windows RT was a big
mistake, which they appear to be sort of remedying with their
recent Continuum/Universal-app moves. Ironically, this was one
of the few cases when Microsoft was too early, because mobile
devices were probably not powerful enough when Windows 8 came out
three years ago.
Interestingly, Canonical could've beat everyone to the punch
here. They had what was basically "continuum for linux" more or
less already working, but then...they just...what, threw it in
the trash bin or something? I dunno, I don't quite get
Canonical sometimes.
I get the sense that they're a small organization that bit off
something way too big for them.
