The Promise of the Web

http://www.alertdebugging.com/2011/09/22/the-promise-of-the-web/

by kr589213 • 15 years ago

47 24 15 years ago

alertdebugging.com

kr5892132• 15 years ago

A response to Joe Hewitt's "Web Technologies need an Owner"

DanielRibeiro• 15 years ago

Great article by Cappuccino creator and 280 North founder, Tolmasky.

Some relevant links:

HN Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3024342

The article: http://joehewitt.com/post/web-technologies-need-an-owner/

The original Post on TC: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/joe-hewitt-web-development/

rbranson• 15 years ago

Suffers the same problem: long on words, very short on evidence. It's theology.

tolmasky4• 15 years ago

Care to elaborate? I feel that I went out of my way to provide a number of pertinent examples.

I pointed to the trend of traditional web properties moving to native apps when it came to mobile. Things like nytimes, economist, and even Facebook.

I discussed how most new social networks on mobile that have gained any traction or attention (such as FourSquare and Path) were largely a native phenomenon (even Google+ chose to have a native iPhone app).

I talked about very real examples of how Flash was important in the development of the web.

I believe that there are a lot of valid counterpoints to my argument, and I'm actually really interested in hearing and thinking about them. However, I don't think hand-waiving it away as "theology" is one of them.

kr5892132• 15 years ago

I disagree. How do you provide evidence of something that doesn't yet exist? The tech industry thrives on innovation and change.

dr_rezzy• 15 years ago

I thought this was very well written and clear. These authors bring up a very valid point. Not really sure if the web can reinvent itself. Java applets and Flash both failed along the same lines. Maybe the web (and HTTP) is only good for relaying information and rich experiences will always be native. It doesn't have to be that way, it just is.

tlrobinson• 15 years ago

I think Google's Native Client is our best chance for something like what he describes.

It provides a sandbox for executing untrusted machine code (or PNaCl for more portable LLVM bytecode), downloaded on the fly, which would enable efficient implementations of things like HTML/CSS/JS.

I look forward to the day someone gets a browser rendering engine compiled and running in NaCl.

leoc• 15 years ago

You also need some extra content-negotiation abilities, but that shouldn't be too hard: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131870 . I'll pull out this bit:

> Finally, the process can chain, so a particular [data/DSL] file might be given to a display program which is a Ruby script which would in turn be given to a generic-runtime interpreter for the appropriate version of Ruby.

So it's untrue that using NaCl or something similar means that all code (let alone all data) has to be sent to the browser already compiled down to assembler (or PNaCl bitcode or whatever). Among other things, this is one important reason why Mozilla is wrong to claim that adoption of NaCl (or whatever) would mean that HLL/scripting-language/whatever code distributed over the Web would no longer be able to benefit automatically from speed improvements to the browser's HLL runtime(s). Chained content negotiation is your friend TM.

icebraining3• 15 years ago

Terrible, just terrible ideas.

This is looking only through the perspective of the content creator, ignoring the client. We're only just know trying to add some structure to the content, and we already have Microformats, RDFa and Microdata, all with incompatible formats and semantics. Now we couldn't even rely on the semantics of HTML?

He sees the web as a app distribution mechanism and the browsers as just dumb viewers. I think the web is much more than that: it's an information distribution mechanism, and that's only possible if there is standardization of protocols and formats.

tolmasky4• 15 years ago

I think you are focusing too much on the admittedly very unfleshed out proposal for a solution, and less on what I think matters most, which is the acceptance of what I believe to be a problem with the web.

Perhaps this is my fault for ending on that point, but do you also disagree with all the other paragraphs? I ask this honestly, because if we can just agree on that much, then I totally agree that there are a number of options that are worth discussing to make the web competitive in a way that scales again.

icebraining3• 15 years ago

I think the HTML/CSS/JS part of the web is competitive in certain domains, and native apps on others. Frankly, I don't see the problem with this. Walled gardens are certainly a problem, but there's no need to throw out the baby (native apps) with the bathwater.

As for plugins, I've never seen them as benefit. Either you're a big player and then you can influence the direction of the web, or you're just some random guy and your plugin is irrelevant because no one will download it just to see some websites.

There was an SVG plugin way before browsers supported it natively, but could any web dev actually rely on it?

daleharvey• 15 years ago

    "Now imagine a world where the browser ran something
    lower level. Where Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera, 
    and Apple’s jobs in providing a browser more resembled 
    Intel’s job of providing a chipset: they simply 
    provided hooks for basic technologies like sound, 
    camera, movies, geolocation, etc. And on top of that,
    we the developers wrote HTML, CSS, JavaScript"

here lies the problem, coffeescript was cited in the article, you yourself wrote or at least worked with obj-j, there is haml and sass, writing alternatives to javascript / html / css is not a problem, people are doing it all the time. If browsers cant provide access to higher level API's in a complete and consistent manner, how do we expect them to provide low level ones?

There are 2 main problems with the web right now that I can see being brought up repeatedly

1. Devices / Lower level API's, new android devices have access to the camera but all things considering that is very weak, why do we not have standard solutions for clipboard access, device apis, filesystem apis, storage etc

Phonegap are doing great work for this on mobile, Mozilla have also talked about this in their mobile browser, if phonegap can do this cross platform then how in the hell can browser manufacturers not? why doesnt firefox already ship with this support on the desktop?

2. is performance, is javascript going to ever be fast enough that we can build rich applications and games, right now the smallest page animation triggers ridiculous stuttering, is it javascripts problem or the doms? is it fixable with current solutions? blazing fast hardware accelerated webgl or canvas doesnt matter if the host language cant lookup a variable without random second long pauses.

nacl is often brought up as the solution here, but I have a hard time seeing how providing a sandbox to execute native code is gonna help me build a nice mobile app that uses web technologies (forms, links, standard tools for accessibility) and can still do a decent page transition without stuttering

This article doesnt seem to draw any conclusions about how to solve these, and the "everyone can be the owner of the web" seems almost like its apologizing for Joe Hewitts confusingly completely off base conclusions.

I dont have any answers either, but happy that the conversation is being started.

tolmasky4• 15 years ago

You bring up some really good points. I also agree that NaCl is not ideal. In my opinion plain text transmission of data is essential for the web, which would allow things like Google to keep working regardless of the "language" being used, whether it be HTML or Markdown, etc.

Having thought about it more, I think the real issue here is standards. All these other problems are a function of that in my opinion. The problem with standard stagnation and lack of competitiveness, whether it be missing features or hardware access, is not a coincidence in my opinion. This isn't some rut we are currently in that if we work hard enough we'll get out of. Instead, I think that the structurally process itself is predisposed to it. 5 years from now, the web will just have a new set of technologies that its behind native on. In other words, the way things are headed, the web can never be cutting edge. And sure, there will always be things that work well on the web, but I would personally like a cutting edge web.

Additionally, I'd like to add that as I stated in the article, I have discussed these thoughts with Joe on more than one occasion, and even had him look this over beforehand to make sure I wasn't putting words in his mouth. I don't think I was apologizing for Joe, I just think this is a really complex situation where the same analysis can take different shapes.

Me10003• 15 years ago

Your second point is moot. 280slides proved high quality desktop class applications are possible on the web. Cappuccino helped reinforce that fact by providing several more apps, some of which rival even their desktop counterpart (picsengine, which no longer accepts new subscribers, is just as capable as iPhoto. In fact my father actually like Picsengine better!)

Recently the new iCloud applications show that sexy animations are also possible on the web, if you're willing to put time into polishing it!

Performance on the web hasn't _really_ been an issue in years. The real issue is bad developers set the bar for web applications very low.

nupark24• 15 years ago

Your second point is moot. 280slides proved high quality desktop class applications are possible on the web ...

So ... where are they now? It was a nicer webapp, but no substitute for Keynote. Having worked with ObjJ/Cappaccino, I found it to be a frustrating attempt at working around the browser, rather than an actual solution.

Performance on the web hasn't _really_ been an issue in years. The real issue is bad developers set the bar for web applications very low.

That's poppycock. In terme of performance, you simply can't come close to what native apps are doing. We invest enormous effort in leveraging threading and extremely low cost implementations in native code, even dropping down to NEON/etc where appropriate.

There is room for higher level languages (arguably that's what ObjC is, plus ARC) but JS simply is not a replacement for what native app developers are doing. NaCL is.

johngalt• 15 years ago

If you look at the old OSI model and the original thoughts of the way the internet was supposed to work you see that it was supposed to be vastly more diverse than simply a browser window rendering HTML.

nupark24• 15 years ago

While it's great to see web guys confronting the very real failings of HTML/JS as an application platform, I think the cultural inertia is practically insurmountable.

Web developers will be the least receptive audience possible to the idea that web applications can't compete as-is with native platforms. Native development requires a whole new skillset -- one that is likely beyond that of many existing web developers, and it requires abandoning years of cognitive training. It requires admitting that you can't necessarily have both a great app and search engine indexible app.

Google may succeed with NaCL, but I don't see how anyone else will. Mozilla is steadfastly opposed to progress beyond HTML/JS, and Apple has no interest in undercutting their own platforms.

cousin_it• 15 years ago

The article does a really good job outlining the problem:

1. The web is losing ground to mobile apps. The New York Times should have been the perfect use case for the web, yet they are a native app on mobile platforms. If we extrapolate this rate of change, five years from now people will be self-publishing blog apps instead of sending you a URL.

2. That's because the web lags behind native apps in features and polish of user experience.

3. Which is because innovation on the web is gated on major browser vendors, who are slow and prone to political infighting (e.g. over video codecs).

4. The only way for little guys to add features to the web (e.g. video) is to make browser plugins (e.g. Flash). So the crusade against Flash and plugins was a bad thing.

Then the article goes on to propose a solution that I don't think is very good, but hey, at least it's a try.

The Promise of the Web

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