6 ms·

As a web user, I'm not grateful. I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. All websites look sligh

As a web user, I'm not grateful. I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. All websites look slightly better, but the client side dies a little bit every time. In the web circa '96, anyone could write a web spider or web browser, and everyone did. There was tremendous innovation both client-side and server-side. Client-side innovations included things like search engines and Google. With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. I don't think this is a net win for the world.

gscott 15y ago
The Les Paul guitar worked in IE6. If they can get that to work, everything else should be easy.
maratd 15y ago
> I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. If that's all it was, then you'd be right. You can't do geolocation, local storage, audio/video, canvas/svg/webgl, etc. etc. on old browsers. It's not about making things pretty. It's about creating software that can compete with desktop alternatives.
- eropple 15y ago
  Unspoken assumption: that competing with desktop alternatives is good or desired. Personally, I can't think of a single desktop application that I use that is better done in a browser with the possible exception of Google Maps, and I say "possible" because I haven't seen a desktop contender. I use GMail's web interface solely because I can't stand any of the Mac clients (at work) and Outlook isn't available on Linux (which a couple of my PCs at home run). It is cross-platform, which is a plus; it is painfully ugly and slower than a desktop alternative, which is an overwhelming minus. I greatly prefer my web browser to be for browsing the web. While I'm all for standards in HTML/CSS/JS, I find the "web browser as your OS!" crap to be disheartening. I like things that work, and for the most part, web applications don't.
  - danssig 15y ago
    I share you views. Making a web app is easier for the developer: just one platform to support, no restrictions on implementation, etc. But a desktop app is nicer for the users (the ones we're supposed to care about, right?). In the very best case a web app would be able to function as good as a desktop app. The best case is usually not achieved. Imagine if a person at your job said they had just made a new client app for your business users workflow. When you ask how it's implemented the person says that the GUI itself is just a skin that reads everything from the database. The GUI layout, how the buttons behave, all of it is stored in the database and the actual GUI is nothing more than a kind of platform for what's in the database. I've actually seen this done and the team who did it were sacked, their application deprecated. As far as I know it's still running because the team in charge of replacing it still doesn't completely understand it. But this is what web apps are. Model, view, presenter, they're all stored in the same place. Personally, I prefer having a back end RESTful server with native... shall we say "fit" clients (not fat but not thin either) using it. The browser gets a simplified, default version of the app which has a link to the appropriate native client somewhere visible.
    - maratd 15y ago
      Time = $$$. Universal constant. While your desktop app may be shinier, it takes much more time to create and maintain. This means fewer apps are published and fewer features are added. Less choices and fewer features translate to a negative for the user. On top of that, native desktop apps are compiled ... the web is open, with html/css/javascript/etc. and this creates an open environment that encourages free software. Free is always good for the user. Anyway, re-arguing this sort of thing is pointless. The desktop is in a death spiral. All this stuff has already been set in stone. It's a question of when, not if.
glhaynes 15y ago
With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. What?
- mnutt 15y ago
  I think he's saying that it makes scraping harder. But today JS frameworks like jQuery give us the means to do anything we want javascript-related, in any browser that half-supports javascript. By deprecating IE7 they're just saying they're going to drop all of the extra hacks they had to use to keep IE7 working. A lot of what newer browsers give us is just better rendering. You can replace a mess of tables and nested divs with things like border-radius, which means less client-side html to wade through.
  - cypherpunks 15y ago
    Not just scraping. Any sort of non-human parsing of web pages. Look at the 1990s literature on web agents for lots of applications.
    - dreamdu5t 15y ago
      Well yeah, the web as a collection of interlinked information is dead. It's now television 2.0 with most innovation going to marketing.
    - icebraining 15y ago
      Are you kidding? The semantic web and using more metadata is making it easier than ever. Nowadays in many cases not only you have the content, as it is tagged with microformats or RDFa. Try looking at Freebase or DBpedia and tell me where did you have such a huge amount of easily parsable, semantic content in the 90s.
      - prodigal_erik 15y ago
        More and more content is being taken entirely off the open web and siloed behind a server that talks an unstable proprietary protocol, with exactly one blob of javascript in existence that knows how to tunnel requests over HTTP to access shreds of that content and cram them into an utterly non-semantic DOM. We are hurtling backwards into the client-server hell the web had saved us from.
benihana 15y ago
With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. Are you serious? Have you heard of the canvas element? It allows modern browsers to do things that were only possible 2 years ago in Flash. Have you noticed how there are actual web applications, not just a collection of linked pages these days? Have you noticed how with ubiquitous JavaScript, the usability and ease of websites has improved greatly?
- cypherpunks 15y ago
  No. I haven't. I've noticed maybe 1 or 2 web apps I want to use (Google Docs and Google Maps). Beyond that, I don't see anything that couldn't be delivered more effectively without JavaScript that I want or need. Usability is not up. Each web site has its own, custom, non-standard user interface. I could teach my mom to use the web circa '96. I cannot teach her to use it today. It's too damn complex. Usability would be up if the browser knew more about what to expect. You can look at things like Readability. The browser ought to know more about the content, and be able to present it in a coherent, usable way. The server-side shouldn't dictate presentation.
  - pak 15y ago
    A big part of usability is not sitting around waiting for entire pages to reload every time you interact with them. AJAX has done great things for users by minimizing this delay. You wouldn't like Google Maps as much if you had to click an arrow and wait for a page refresh for the map to move, like MapQuest circa 2003. Yes, the proliferation of web apps has created a diversity of user interface paradigms. Some would say this is a good thing, however, since the web has spurred all kinds of new UI philosophies, and the fact that JavaScript and HTML isn't compiled allows people to examine and re-work others' code, so good ideas spread very quickly. I for one don't intend on waiting for the HTML5 group to invent every new <input type=""> that I could conceivably need, and then wait some more for browser vendors to implement them all consistently. With JavaScript, you can currently build and deploy just about any kind of 2D client-side interaction imaginable. In short, the vast majority of users on the internet probably have a different idea of usability than yours, and the numbers tell the rest of that story. You only need to look at the gross casserole of UI paradigms within the applications installed on your mom's PC to see how much users really care about UI standardization.
stanleydrew 15y ago
In what sense is Google a "client-side innovation"?
- cypherpunks 15y ago
  The Google Spider grabs pages from other servers. That's a web client. It's a web client that was easy to write when Google was started, but is almost impossible to write today. If search engines hadn't been invented 20 years ago, they'd be impossible to invent today. The only reason they still work is tremendous work on Google's end to have its spider be able to spider complex AJAXy pages, and that content creators engage in SEO and develop to Google.
  - stanleydrew 15y ago
    Indeed I see now what you mean.
    - cypherpunks 15y ago
      I'm glad. Thank you for taking the time to read and understand. Hacker News is starting to go down the decline that hit reddit 2 years ago, where people don't bother to try to understand different viewpoints, and just downvote anything they don't agree with. It's nice to see good people still on here...
  - jm4 15y ago
    It is not harder or easier. It is just different than it used to be. Things that used to be hard are easy now. Problems that didn't exist 10 years ago exist today. I develop a spider. For the most part, the bulk of the web's content is as easily accessible as it was years ago. You make a request and you get a blob of HTML back. If you have special requirements and need to get into all the nooks and crannies you create a DOM implementation and embed a JavaScript engine. Then you parse the page into a DOM and start firing off events. There are quality open source JavaScript engines available. JavaScript and AJAX are a breeze. Flash is a different story. If you have any requirement to follow links or process content in a Flash movie (you'd be surprised how many sites still have Flash nav) you pretty much have to write your own runtime. Unless you are big enough to have Adobe do it for you. Depending on what you are doing with the data that your spider collects, chances are writing a spider is far easier than writing a browser. There are at least 4 widely used browser engines and plenty more toy browsers floating around. I can guarantee that writing a spider that can deal with AJAX is not the biggest challenge of developing a search engine. Scaling it, fighting SPAM, understanding the content, indexing and then being able to provide quick lookups are much, much harder.
stanleydrew 15y ago
With respect, I think this is the same innovation that occurs in every industry and it's silly to bemoan the increasing complexity of the web. In transportation: It used to be that everyone could buy a horse and build a buggy and get around. Then cars came along and it got a lot more complicated and expensive to build a vehicle that was state-of-the-art, but tinkerers could still do it. Now there are only a few big players who are capable of innovating and building the best and newest vehicles. Now that I think about it though, there is still space for tinkerers and inventors in the automobile space. But You can't expect those automobiles to compete with those made by, e.g., Toyota. In the same way, it's still possible to write a spider without a javascript renderer. It just won't be able to compete with Google. One last point: the state of the web is based on the collective decisions of all internet users. Ultimately, people building things on the web decided more often than not that ajax-ifying things benefited their users. If users had wanted a web client that would spider the web and shop for them, they would have latched onto it during the time of great innovation that you think is now gone. But they didn't. The things that users wanted are the things we see today, assuming that there isn't some horrible inefficiency in the feedback loop between web-builders and their users.
jarrett 15y ago
I echo the comments others have made about the wide range of improvements offered by modern browsers. But even putting that aside, the rendering capabilities you refer to make a bigger difference to web users than you might think. You say "I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better." But--no disrespect--you probably only feel that way because you're already benefitting from the huge amounts of effort invested in supporting multiple, incompatible browsers. The web looks OK for you now because, without you noticing it, web developers have slaved to make it look OK for your unique combination of OS and browser. It may seem like that's just a cost we web developers have to bear, with little effect on you. But that's not so. The fact that we have to spend time supporting old browsers increases the cost of everything that's created on the web. And when innovation is more expensive, it happens more slowly. The costs imposed on our industry by older browsers do effect ordinary web users, because those costs translate into a slower pace of innovation.
valisystem 15y ago
> I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. I think the point for making ie7 deprecated legacy is more about its hideous bugs in the parsing, internal document representation and rendering bugs. It is the things that makes proper code unable to be displayed properly without the tedious work of understanding the dysfunctions to circumvent them properly. To me, the old IE rendering engines alone has slowed web innovation for at least several years all by themselves.

gscott 15y ago

The Les Paul guitar worked in IE6. If they can get that to work, everything else should be easy.

maratd 15y ago

> I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. If that's all it was, then you'd be right. You can't do geolocation, local storage, audio/video, canvas/svg/webgl, etc. etc. on old browsers. It's not about making things pretty. It's about creating software that can compete with desktop alternatives.

eropple 15y ago
Unspoken assumption: that competing with desktop alternatives is good or desired. Personally, I can't think of a single desktop application that I use that is better done in a browser with the possible exception of Google Maps, and I say "possible" because I haven't seen a desktop contender. I use GMail's web interface solely because I can't stand any of the Mac clients (at work) and Outlook isn't available on Linux (which a couple of my PCs at home run). It is cross-platform, which is a plus; it is painfully ugly and slower than a desktop alternative, which is an overwhelming minus. I greatly prefer my web browser to be for browsing the web. While I'm all for standards in HTML/CSS/JS, I find the "web browser as your OS!" crap to be disheartening. I like things that work, and for the most part, web applications don't.
- danssig 15y ago
  I share you views. Making a web app is easier for the developer: just one platform to support, no restrictions on implementation, etc. But a desktop app is nicer for the users (the ones we're supposed to care about, right?). In the very best case a web app would be able to function as good as a desktop app. The best case is usually not achieved. Imagine if a person at your job said they had just made a new client app for your business users workflow. When you ask how it's implemented the person says that the GUI itself is just a skin that reads everything from the database. The GUI layout, how the buttons behave, all of it is stored in the database and the actual GUI is nothing more than a kind of platform for what's in the database. I've actually seen this done and the team who did it were sacked, their application deprecated. As far as I know it's still running because the team in charge of replacing it still doesn't completely understand it. But this is what web apps are. Model, view, presenter, they're all stored in the same place. Personally, I prefer having a back end RESTful server with native... shall we say "fit" clients (not fat but not thin either) using it. The browser gets a simplified, default version of the app which has a link to the appropriate native client somewhere visible.
  - maratd 15y ago
    Time = $$$. Universal constant. While your desktop app may be shinier, it takes much more time to create and maintain. This means fewer apps are published and fewer features are added. Less choices and fewer features translate to a negative for the user. On top of that, native desktop apps are compiled ... the web is open, with html/css/javascript/etc. and this creates an open environment that encourages free software. Free is always good for the user. Anyway, re-arguing this sort of thing is pointless. The desktop is in a death spiral. All this stuff has already been set in stone. It's a question of when, not if.

glhaynes 15y ago

With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. What?

mnutt 15y ago
I think he's saying that it makes scraping harder. But today JS frameworks like jQuery give us the means to do anything we want javascript-related, in any browser that half-supports javascript. By deprecating IE7 they're just saying they're going to drop all of the extra hacks they had to use to keep IE7 working. A lot of what newer browsers give us is just better rendering. You can replace a mess of tables and nested divs with things like border-radius, which means less client-side html to wade through.
- cypherpunks 15y ago
  Not just scraping. Any sort of non-human parsing of web pages. Look at the 1990s literature on web agents for lots of applications.
  - dreamdu5t 15y ago
    Well yeah, the web as a collection of interlinked information is dead. It's now television 2.0 with most innovation going to marketing.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    Are you kidding? The semantic web and using more metadata is making it easier than ever. Nowadays in many cases not only you have the content, as it is tagged with microformats or RDFa. Try looking at Freebase or DBpedia and tell me where did you have such a huge amount of easily parsable, semantic content in the 90s.
    - prodigal_erik 15y ago
      More and more content is being taken entirely off the open web and siloed behind a server that talks an unstable proprietary protocol, with exactly one blob of javascript in existence that knows how to tunnel requests over HTTP to access shreds of that content and cram them into an utterly non-semantic DOM. We are hurtling backwards into the client-server hell the web had saved us from.

benihana 15y ago

With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible. Are you serious? Have you heard of the canvas element? It allows modern browsers to do things that were only possible 2 years ago in Flash. Have you noticed how there are actual web applications, not just a collection of linked pages these days? Have you noticed how with ubiquitous JavaScript, the usability and ease of websites has improved greatly?

cypherpunks 15y ago
No. I haven't. I've noticed maybe 1 or 2 web apps I want to use (Google Docs and Google Maps). Beyond that, I don't see anything that couldn't be delivered more effectively without JavaScript that I want or need. Usability is not up. Each web site has its own, custom, non-standard user interface. I could teach my mom to use the web circa '96. I cannot teach her to use it today. It's too damn complex. Usability would be up if the browser knew more about what to expect. You can look at things like Readability. The browser ought to know more about the content, and be able to present it in a coherent, usable way. The server-side shouldn't dictate presentation.
- pak 15y ago
  A big part of usability is not sitting around waiting for entire pages to reload every time you interact with them. AJAX has done great things for users by minimizing this delay. You wouldn't like Google Maps as much if you had to click an arrow and wait for a page refresh for the map to move, like MapQuest circa 2003. Yes, the proliferation of web apps has created a diversity of user interface paradigms. Some would say this is a good thing, however, since the web has spurred all kinds of new UI philosophies, and the fact that JavaScript and HTML isn't compiled allows people to examine and re-work others' code, so good ideas spread very quickly. I for one don't intend on waiting for the HTML5 group to invent every new <input type=""> that I could conceivably need, and then wait some more for browser vendors to implement them all consistently. With JavaScript, you can currently build and deploy just about any kind of 2D client-side interaction imaginable. In short, the vast majority of users on the internet probably have a different idea of usability than yours, and the numbers tell the rest of that story. You only need to look at the gross casserole of UI paradigms within the applications installed on your mom's PC to see how much users really care about UI standardization.

stanleydrew 15y ago

In what sense is Google a "client-side innovation"?

cypherpunks 15y ago
The Google Spider grabs pages from other servers. That's a web client. It's a web client that was easy to write when Google was started, but is almost impossible to write today. If search engines hadn't been invented 20 years ago, they'd be impossible to invent today. The only reason they still work is tremendous work on Google's end to have its spider be able to spider complex AJAXy pages, and that content creators engage in SEO and develop to Google.
- stanleydrew 15y ago
  Indeed I see now what you mean.
  - cypherpunks 15y ago
    I'm glad. Thank you for taking the time to read and understand. Hacker News is starting to go down the decline that hit reddit 2 years ago, where people don't bother to try to understand different viewpoints, and just downvote anything they don't agree with. It's nice to see good people still on here...
- jm4 15y ago
  It is not harder or easier. It is just different than it used to be. Things that used to be hard are easy now. Problems that didn't exist 10 years ago exist today. I develop a spider. For the most part, the bulk of the web's content is as easily accessible as it was years ago. You make a request and you get a blob of HTML back. If you have special requirements and need to get into all the nooks and crannies you create a DOM implementation and embed a JavaScript engine. Then you parse the page into a DOM and start firing off events. There are quality open source JavaScript engines available. JavaScript and AJAX are a breeze. Flash is a different story. If you have any requirement to follow links or process content in a Flash movie (you'd be surprised how many sites still have Flash nav) you pretty much have to write your own runtime. Unless you are big enough to have Adobe do it for you. Depending on what you are doing with the data that your spider collects, chances are writing a spider is far easier than writing a browser. There are at least 4 widely used browser engines and plenty more toy browsers floating around. I can guarantee that writing a spider that can deal with AJAX is not the biggest challenge of developing a search engine. Scaling it, fighting SPAM, understanding the content, indexing and then being able to provide quick lookups are much, much harder.

stanleydrew 15y ago

With respect, I think this is the same innovation that occurs in every industry and it's silly to bemoan the increasing complexity of the web. In transportation: It used to be that everyone could buy a horse and build a buggy and get around. Then cars came along and it got a lot more complicated and expensive to build a vehicle that was state-of-the-art, but tinkerers could still do it. Now there are only a few big players who are capable of innovating and building the best and newest vehicles. Now that I think about it though, there is still space for tinkerers and inventors in the automobile space. But You can't expect those automobiles to compete with those made by, e.g., Toyota. In the same way, it's still possible to write a spider without a javascript renderer. It just won't be able to compete with Google. One last point: the state of the web is based on the collective decisions of all internet users. Ultimately, people building things on the web decided more often than not that ajax-ifying things benefited their users. If users had wanted a web client that would spider the web and shop for them, they would have latched onto it during the time of great innovation that you think is now gone. But they didn't. The things that users wanted are the things we see today, assuming that there isn't some horrible inefficiency in the feedback loop between web-builders and their users.

jarrett 15y ago

I echo the comments others have made about the wide range of improvements offered by modern browsers. But even putting that aside, the rendering capabilities you refer to make a bigger difference to web users than you might think. You say "I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better." But--no disrespect--you probably only feel that way because you're already benefitting from the huge amounts of effort invested in supporting multiple, incompatible browsers. The web looks OK for you now because, without you noticing it, web developers have slaved to make it look OK for your unique combination of OS and browser. It may seem like that's just a cost we web developers have to bear, with little effect on you. But that's not so. The fact that we have to spend time supporting old browsers increases the cost of everything that's created on the web. And when innovation is more expensive, it happens more slowly. The costs imposed on our industry by older browsers do effect ordinary web users, because those costs translate into a slower pace of innovation.

valisystem 15y ago

> I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better. I think the point for making ie7 deprecated legacy is more about its hideous bugs in the parsing, internal document representation and rendering bugs. It is the things that makes proper code unable to be displayed properly without the tedious work of understanding the dysfunctions to circumvent them properly. To me, the old IE rendering engines alone has slowed web innovation for at least several years all by themselves.