Towards a Modern Web Stack (Ian 'Hixie' Hickson)

https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?continue=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/preview&dsh=S-184152828:1675268317749309&flowEntry=ServiceLogin&followup=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/preview&ifkv=AWnogHegeZW9fXvI96qayA9snJIV1D2msE5L35t9Bews9WyQsABGUoYynvMtOLgAhmdS60518mdTSQ&ltmpl=docs&nojavascript=1&osid=1&service=wise

by bpierre • 3 years ago

10 11 3 years ago

accounts.google.com

rektide2• 3 years ago

This would not be the web. Why have a browser at all here? It would be a bunch of bitmaps on the screen.

There's 0 user agency to this scheme.

Developers (some) might enjoy this but this is bad for humankind. A garbage fire of Flash, forever & ever. Un-web. Having no high level interfaces to stand upon, using the web as a low level pixel-out target is the worst look a web company could propose, is deeply betraying to one of the only technological projects that has expanded human liberty. This is a horrible mis-step in the technosocial society.

And the intro sections attempt to malign seems intense weak sauce. "Quirky" feels like mostly works pretty great, for a huge huge number of the largest rank of developers- web developers. But oh no, visual centering is hard! Burn it down! Oh no there are some oddly named input gestures (which?), burn it down! Based off the proliferation of design systems (& having worked on a few), styling components is not on my list of complaints at all. I think many working developers handle what we have fine & are not nearly as restrained or encumbered as this slander puts-down.

This feels like an elite concern & self-justification that is unhinged from the real world. Where do developers sign up to say they dont have the awful terrible miserable forsaken life this post declares to be our conditions, needing total revolution?

The harm is just so great; blowing up our shared language to turn the web into a low level platform for pixels. This is the fall of information-society Babel, a fools quest, of ruin. Scattering us to many totally unique utterly unrelated development platforms, none of which have any power any web-extensions, any user scripting. This is a control technology, slams the door on the holistic better nature of the web, and that is an awful plight to perpetrate against the user, a sad & dark leaving of a bright information society to head into the Dark Forest of computing. What is the meat, what justifies this attempt to kill structured hypermedia & replace the world wide web with a web of bitmaps?

Hixie4• 3 years ago

*hugs*

rektide2• 3 years ago

Was pretty surprising to me seeing you embrace the Flutter/CanvasKit plan, take it as a good prototype & support furthering this. The web has always seemed so rich in virtue & principle, gives us so much, and I always would have assumed you saw & got some of that, some of the worth & dignity of the web endeavour. This feels reaching for something so utterly & different & opposed to that shared medium we have, and I cant comprehend how dark one's perception must be to walk the path of abandoning a shared medium for structure-less freeform running code.

I just wish I saw any hope for an standard or interoperability, saw this as a starting point for better or more inter-networking of systems, which has been one of the most brilliant & faith-building-in-humanity things I've been so fortunate to experience the rise of, has been so inspirational. The web has been so obviously & clearly better than everything else in computing by being a medium, has so many virtues by being just self-modylifying documents. It has been stunningly inspirational.

By compare, this feels like walking into the dark. There is no medium of exchange here; just a screen with bitmaps. I want to have some at least vague sense that someone other than developers would be enhanced by a supplantative would-be-media like what is proposed here, want to imagine some real core connective substance that is at least as good as what we have.

I dont see any cognizance or respect from very good long standing web folk like yourself that this kind of effort has huge downsides and risk to users. Rather than everyone sharing a same web kernel, any developer can build their own app kernel & reinvent everything... it's bold & powerful an idea, and I struggle enormously to say (so very conservatively): no, this is a frontier we should not explore. I cherish exploration so much. But this doesnt seem like a medium to me, it doesnt seem like it's anything aside from giving everything we have & share up completely, to embrace a path of starting from nothing, and this time having no common interchange to work forward together with. Users having not a rich document, but just having a shitty low grade unintelligible illegible mess: having only running code. The idea of that, to me, resembles an attack, against the web, against the idea of inter-networking, and against people.

Hugs back Hixie, holy frelling frak!

Hixie4• 3 years ago

That link is broken, FWIW, the correct link is https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC...

satvikpendem• 3 years ago

This is exactly the same thoughts I had before, having a new sort of framework on top of WASM instead of using the HTML/CSS/JS framework, specifically for building new applications. Glad to see this is on your mind as well.

dmitriid2• 3 years ago

I commented on twitter, but I'll comment here as well:

By providing low-level primitives instead, applications could ship with their own implementations of high-level concepts like layout, widgets, and gestures, enabling a much richer set of interactions and custom experiences with much less effort on the part of the developer.

This means that even 20 years from now all the "UI frameworks" will keep busy reinventing the same dozen-or-so primitive controls: avatars, buttons, tabs.

The value of other systems isn't just in providing the most primitive of primitives. The value is also in providing the right set of high-level APIs.

Building a fully-accessible properly behaving combobox from scratch using only WebGPU primitives? Good luck with that. Meanwhile elsewhere I can just reach for one, and have it available, with all the expected platform behaviour. Same goes for hundreds, if not thousands, little things that you need to account for.

If the quest for the future of the web doesn't include something like https://open-ui.org on the roadmap, it has failed before even starting. Because the future in the document is already here. And there are vanishingly few companies that have the wherewithal and technical acumen to pull off building a UI from scratch.

Towards a Modern Web Stack (Ian 'Hixie' Hickson)

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