this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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World Wide Web was not intended to be an app framework.
Yet Internet just scaled up to handle worldwide traffic, while WWW evolved into mess noone is able to implement anymore.
Inspect any major website, you'll see boilerplate of
<div><div><div><div>and unreadable pile of JavaScript programs your browser need to run to build the website. Sites should be done in a way that is still readable after you disable one element (for example disable CSS function, scripts or HTML specific tag).Internet is modular, based on stacked protocols. Want to fit Tor between TCP and HTTP? No problem. Web is also like that, build of semi-independent formats, in theory. But in practice devs are using frameworks that assume Chrome, Firefox and Safari are and would ever be the only things existing. Now if you want to develop new browser you not only need to display HTML and add other things later. You need to get all specifications of all standards working right away or sites would spectacularly break.
It's a bit of a shame that HTML went from describing documents to describing UIs. I do miss the days of simple websites, although I'm not old enough to remember the old old internet.
What's the alternative? Or an alternative I guess I should say. I agree though, I wish folks would use HTML for all documents. Like why the hell am I downloading a PDF of a thing I'm never printing? (PDFs are still acceptable for printing though.)
I don't think there's anything wrong with using HTML/XML-ish format for describing a UI (although having a standardized presentation format that all "viewers/browsers" follow exactly the same way would be nice), I'm just sad that websites have become described as UIs rather than as well-structured documents.
Yes, the issue is with web developers not following standards. However, because all of them fail to do this, the problem ends up being with the browser that doesn't support everyone's non-standard developments.
I just want my text in the centre of the page (not with rows stretched across a widescreen monitor) and for things to not jump about as they load. Figure out where things should go, then display it.
Web standards? You talk funny, funny man
https://xkcd.com/927/
Speak for yourself，nerd
What else works across as many platforms and screen sizes as well as the combination of HTML/CSS/JS?
Most attempts to build that just lead to a worse version of it.
I'll be the first to admit it's bloated to all hell after 25 years of people stacking crap on top of more crap, and it's perilously close to being completely controlled by Google, but it is what it is.
Doom. It runs on every-fucking-thing
New Doom speedrun category: controlling with a Porsche
Commodore fucking 64
(Undergirded ever so slightly by a Raspberry Pi but don't mention it)
Maybe I do not specify clearly what I mean.
Why to order taxi, access bank, register a domain name do we have to have apps on all platforms and then to fix this problem we bloat the web by creating webapps. Why not just plain simple HTML website beautified with CSS instead?
Real cross-platform apps are those written in, for example QT. Then came Android and iOS forcing everyone to use their toolkits so we started to abuse poor web.
Well I'm in agreement there.
The only reason they want everything as an app is so they can push notifications and do any tracking they can legally get away with (and some they can't but who's gonna know?)
Dominos have locked all their deals that actually make a pizza a normal price that humans would willingly pay for a pizza behind their app. There's no reason for them to do this. Surely their business model is selling pizza? So now I go to a little family run pizza shop, pay less and get decent pizza.
Yep.
Your standard web browser has to many privacy protections for you and your data.
Its why they want to push you to an app, that asks for WAY to many permissions to do what it needs to do. Cause it doesnt need that access to function. It needs that access to monitize you. Cause they make more off stealing your information, than they do off you being a customer, Which is why you get so many discounts for using apps.