What Web Can Do Today
whatwebcando.today
whatwebcando.today
All non-application websites should provide all their content in semantic HTML at appropriate HTTP endpoints, with CSS styling (in as few requests as possible) as required per the design, and JavaScript (in as few requests as possible) that takes the semantic HTML and makes it interactive (potentially adding and removing elements from the DOM) as required per the design. The CSS should not depend on mutations resulting from the JavaScript, nor should the JavaScript assume anything of the applied styles (as the user agent should be able to easily apply custom user-styles for your site; e.g. Gmail only providing a limited set of styles that are managed server-side is laughable).
Thus, all content is readable and styled properly without requiring an arbitrary code execution environment. That is what the web was meant to be. Unfortunately, most "web developers" have made the web worse over the past 10 years because simple, functional, minimal technology is not impressive, and hipsters love to show off.
Nor does it help that there are few capitalist incentives for the web being open and malleable -- e.g. so users can easily use a different front-end for Facebook, or users can easily choose to avoid analytics or advertisements, or users might prefer to use the website rather than the app (providing access to personal details, contacts, location, tracking, etc).
The state of the web is emergent and I'm not sure what anyone could do about it (perhaps make a better browser?), but it really irks me when web developers pretend like they're actually doing something good or useful, or that the web is actually in a healthy state. In my experience, it's the people who don't talk about web development who are the best web developers; these are the people who don't wince when they write a HTML document without a single `<script>`.
I was about to argue that this website is actually an excellent example of what you seek -- each link has a separate URL associated with it that returns a page containing that content. The links point to these real URLs so they work with "open in new tab" and "copy link" and in browsers without JavaScript enabled, while the JavaScript that runs when you click it changes the page content via AJAX (possibly saving a few round-trips) and updates the current page URL so that back/forward history and the address bar both work just like you're navigating between real webpages.
And this works perfectly in Firefox (with JavaScript) and almost perfectly in Lynx (the table of contents still fills the first screenful, but that's hard to fix since Lynx doesn't support CSS). But it completely fails if you have JavaScript disabled in Firefox.
Every page starts with the table of contents visible and the content collapsed (through CSS). The page then seems to assume that JavaScript will be able to immediately switch the page to the correct view (i.e. the site is broken if you have working CSS but not JavaScript). Navigation to a given page directly should start the other way by default, and to make that happen is just 21 missing characters (` class="page-feature"` on the <body> tag). However, this unfortunate error completely ruins this otherwise beautiful example of progressive enhancement.
> But it completely fails if you have JavaScript disabled in Firefox.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
We've known for a long time that progressive enhancement IS possible, it's just that very few sites bother to design for that. Are you just saying it's difficult and that this site "almost" made it.
The precursor of the web made by Tim Berners-Lee dates back to 1980, but it was not based on HTML or HTTP. These happened later in 1990 and early 1991. But then CSS happened in 1994. And Javascript happened in 1995 at Netscape, but then Javascript was completely useless until Microsoft came up with the iframe tag in 1996 and then with XMLHttpRequest in 1999, which was later adopted by Mozilla, Safari and Opera. And people still couldn't grasp its potential until Google delivered Gmail in 2004 and Google Maps in 2005.
Not sure what the "the web was meant to be", we should ask Tim Berners-Lee sometimes, but in my opinion the web has been and is whatever its developers and users wanted it to be, with contributions from multiple parties such as Netscape, Microsoft, Mozilla, KDE/KHTML, Apple, Google and many other contributors, being a constantly evolving platform.
The frustrating bit is that CSS was supposed to separate content/structure and markup, but now we have pages without content but with markup where the content is loaded after the fact. This really overshot the mark.
(I'm not really convinced that separation of form and content is a feasible goal anyway - some elements of form are also content at the same time - but it's still a good goal to have.)
> now we have pages without content but with markup where the content is loaded after the fact
This is absolutely ridiculous and it, combined with the idea of routing everything through the cloud in IoT / home automation applications, makes me wonder what happened to some good old-fashioned engineering sanity. It's like people are trying to create wasteful and insecure systems on purpose. ("And what would that purpose be," - the cynic in me asks - "maybe monetizing people's data?").
If a web page is not a good idea, then what other technology should be used to achieve that design, as well as remain equally easy to distribute?
This mindset is precisely why native mobile applications continue to exist on the market, and why articles like this one fail to convince me. Nobody (except perhaps Facebook with React) tries to really fix the web to meet the demands its been given. Instead everyone insists that the demands should change to meet the original vision and limitations of the web.
Regarding the HTML/CSS interplay, flexbox gives me some new hope that reconciliation is possible (getting both semantic markup and powerful / precise styling).
I have no idea what you mean by your second sentence.
And then, are you referring to my mindset or some other mindset? Because I fail to see how you can know my mindset on the matter. If it's the other, I would agree. Except I would say that "fixing" something in terms of making it do something it wasn't intended in the first place may possibly create more problems than we are attempting to fix. I would suggest attempting new things to see if they work, which there are some doing just that. I would point out that flexbox is an example of this.
I'm excited with flexbox and have started pushing to make use of it more often, when warranted. It's hard to switch current code to it, but I think it's worth it. But, in the end, someone will eventually start complaining about its limitations and that it needs to be "fixed". Then we'll be back where we started, it's inevitable.
I was referring to the whole mindset of "the web was not meant to do that". Well, yeah, it wasn't. But its already doing that, so we have to do something to make it properly rise up to the challenge.
And long live them because there is little about the mobile experience that's more infuriating than a web app that should have been made as native. The assumption of being always on-line is baked too deep into the web stack; I have yet to see a well-made web app that could not be made significantly better UX-wise by simply going native.
There are many PhoneGap applications there, and they don't make any "onlineness" assumptions. Their UI does however still suck and does not behave as expected.
It's only hard if you want it to be hard. Your tools should be handling most of it for you. If they don't, pick tools that aren't broken or badly designed. When I was writing websites in Rails 2.x, progressive enhancement was usually automatic (same views are rendered as a page or a dynamically-loaded partial).
Saying "It's hard because I want to write over-complicated pages with badly designed tools" isn't good engineering or good design.
> most users run with their browser's default settings
How, exactly, do you know this? If the answer is "analytics", you are missing an increasing amount of data.
> constantly evolving platform
Which is why you progressively enhance pages. Those of us that disable javascript for safety usually get blamed when this topic is brought up, but the main reason for progressive enhancement is that it's defense in depth. You don't know what the browser is, what options it has set, what bugs it may or may not have, or if extra page assets even made it successfully over the network.
Not bothering with progressive enhancement is shoddy programming for much the same reason you shouldn't skip the test for NULL after calling fopen(3).
edit: grammar
It's not business needs, it's cargo-cult web development. Going with the latest trends without a moment to stop whether it makes sense or is actually what the users want.
They calculated that 1.1% of users don't have the JS enhancements activated, and only 0.3% of those were browsers where JS execution was disabled.
[0] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi...
EDIT: Looks like they covered this in comments. Even that doesn't convince me for some reason.
While that's an interesting question, one of my points was about this common type of claim:
> guess
You admit you don't actually know. I don't either, which is why I program defensively and test for any feature I want to use.
A lot of people seem to be projecting what they want to see, reinforced by confirmation bias. Choosing Javascript based analytics is a great way to conclude that almost nobody uses Javascript.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ghostery/mlomiejdf...
These are some very popular plugins, so my thinking is maybe the answer lies somewhere in between, where security-conscious users are white listing sites they want to run scripts on. Not that they're running completely in js disabled mode. Even though it's a subtle difference I think it's relevant to the strategy one goes in with regarding noscript tag.
So this would make sense to me. If that's right, that most noscript users are just running these plugins, then those folks know that they're going to miss out with some sites, or they'll selectively enable javascript on a case-by-case basis.
This would probably require more extensive review of logs, to see if the person who originally downloaded the noscript image eventually came back to the site with javascript enabled. The likelihood is this would only happen if the site was not functional when they visited with javascript disabled.
The majority of informational sites are actually quite usable without JS. I'd say "the browsing equivalent of running only RMS-approved software" would be never allowing JS, but I'm more pragmatic and only enable it if necessary, for the sites I trust and must use.
But Flash was great in many ways, and it was self-contained in objects, so websites were mostly still websites. JavaScript had been around for a long time, but there was still a cultural norm that most people respected about not requiring JavaScript. This was mainly because a lot of browsers still didn't fully support it, or people had it turned off. It was also when some people had cookies disabled.
Then once Adobe bought Flash, and then Apple blocked Adobe Flash, it really killed the Flash way, and all that spilled over into HTML with HTML 5 and the new cultural norm of kids who are more concerned with showing off socially than the meat and potatoes of hypertextual information.
It should've been obvious that there was a need for a new web, for code and multimedia. But in the .com boom nobody would dare try to start with something unpopulated, since it'd risk losing their chance at fortune.
Today, instead, maybe we should go in the opposite direction and create a new old web; a hypertext network that specifically only works for HTML, so people can have this one to morph into an app network, and we'll not lose the text-linking place we've grown accustomed to.
It's just a minority of users who are accustomed to the old web.
That is never going to convince me.
In other words, it was supposed to be a worldwide hyperlinked document library --- and we have mostly achieved that goal, although it is a library wherein you are constantly tracked and bombarded by books flying off the shelves at you, screaming at you to read them, and most of the books consist solely of ads with very little useful informational content.
In my experience, it's the people who don't talk about web development who are the best web developers; these are the people who don't wince when they write a HTML document without a single `<script>`.
Agreed completely. The ones who write information-dense HTML pages, often by hand, would not be considered "web developers" nor would they consider themselves to be; but they are what the web needs most. I've done that, and I don't consider myself a "web developer" either.
it really irks me when web developers pretend like they're actually doing something good or useful, or that the web is actually in a healthy state
I wouldn't doubt that they genuinely feel like what they're doing is good or useful; I've noticed the appeal of "new and shiny" is especially prevalent in the web development community, with the dozens of frameworks and whatnot coming out almost daily, proposals of new browser features, etc. Very little thought seems put into the important question of whether we actually need all this stuff. It's all under the umbrella of "moving the web forward", whatever that means. But I think we should stop and look back on the monstrosities this rapid growth has created.
And yes, it's pretty silly that this is a thing.
No it's because when I go into work someone says to make it a certain way and if I want to get paid I have to. If you want to blame anyone blame designers who see proof of concept stuff from developers and throw it in designs.
The "almost all sites have JavaScript and will break if you disable it" statement is common, and while I agree that the vast majority of sites do have JS on them, whether or not the stuff that will "break" on them if you disable JS is actually of any use to you is questionable.
It's not even particularly difficult to pull off for certain websites. For example, my blog uses React and it does server-side rendering, so it'll work without JS at all. However, if you do have JS enabled, it'll let you avoid doing full-page reloads to navigate around. I totally agree that for content-focused websites, you tend to get a better experience by limiting gratuitous JS abuse.
However, this isn't very feasible when you're building highly interactive applications. In the case of something like Facebook, they do have a version of their app that works without JS... But how many people can afford to maintain multiple versions of their applications?
I think a good compromise is achievable by well documented APIs or even better with a public GraphQL schema! If I don't use magic APIs to build our frontend app, you can build a different frontend that's tailored for your needs.
Developers are going to use this API to serve me higher resolution assets over my metered WiFi & Ethernet connections (assuming they are unmetered) and lower resolution assets over my unmetered cellular LTE connection (assuming it's metered).
WiFi vs cellular vs Ethernet is not important. What's important is the usage policy behind the connection, and in its current state, the Network Information API can only be used to harm my user experience.
I work on a podcast app. When people are downloading hundreds of MB or more daily, they emphatically want control over when downloading takes place. In practice, almost all of them are satisfied with a binary choice between cellular or not. Those who do sometimes use expensive or slow wifi networks can blacklist them, which is also what network info APIs support.
There are also other applications such as metering apps, utilities that trigger actions upon network changes. Some very popular Android apps (e.g. Tasker, IFTTT) rely on network info for that; web falls further behind if web apps can't access that data.
While I was in the UK I had unlimited data on my mobile but a 100GB limit/month on my landline connection
* punishingly high RTT
* packet-per-timeframe ratelimit
* throttling by queueing packets
* unstability (some requests get served in tens of ms, others get lost in void)
* connection jumping from one provider to another (e.g. mobile/wifi while next to home)
I may also have two connections: fast metered, slow unmetered and would like applications to load important stuff fast over metered network and cosmetics over unmetered one. Too bad I have to pull whole javascript framework first in order to see anything, because web components, and it's uncacheable because it's webpacked with application code.
* Request stuff from arbitrary URLs without a CORS proxy
* Open TCP and UDP sockets
* Be in the play store/app store AS a web app (home screen installation isn't enough; people still search for your thing in the app store, so even if the other problems aren't issues for your app, you still have to wrap your web app in a dummy native framework and upload it if you want users to discover you)
* Scroll like a native app without Safari's stupid rubber band scrolling the entire app at very erratic times
* Barometric sensors
* Background geolocation, background anything really
* launchActivityForResult so you can work with other native goodies
* Intent resolution for native actions
* Geolocation when the user has inadvertently blanket-blocked Geolocation for all of Safari instead of per-webpage. Thankfully Chrome comes pre-approved on Android and you can't accidentally make this mistake as a user
* Face tracking and other OpenCV-based stuff (it's been done, but JS is still not fast enough on mobile to handle these jobs)
* Display long lists of styled content and scroll without stalling
Still though I think touch gestures is really the killer missing feature. There isn't any canonically-supported way to do things like a simple Android ViewPager or pinch-to-zoom. You end up implementing a bunch of spaghetti code to do these things even in the best frameworks (Meteor, Phonegap + Polymer, Angular et al.). And then you find out the way your spaghetti code reacts is a tad different from the way someone else's spaghetti code reacts to the same gestures. This stuff really needs to be standardized on a OS, browser, or at least JS-framework level.
> * Request stuff from arbitrary URLs without a CORS proxy
CORS isn't a proxy; it's a browser policy/algorithm that allows a site the opportunity to say "yes (or no), other websites may (or may not) make AJAX requests here". The native app (unless you've informed it somehow, or it has done something malicious) doesn't have the user's cookies, whereas the browser does, and needs to be a bit more cautious.
> * Open TCP and UDP sockets
There are websockets, which aren't the same, I'll admit. Frankly, I'm not sure I want my web pages to be able to arbitrarily open TCP/UDP sockets. (I don't really want my native apps to be able to on whim, either…)
> * Barometric sensors
You mean like current air pressure? Are there common devices out there with these? (None of my computing devices have anything like this, for example.) (and what would I want this for?)
There's no fundamental reason browsers can't be configured to not send the user's cookies when making XHR requests, and in fact there's already a mechanism for a webpage to ask certain kinds of CORS requests to be "anonymous":
The "anonymous" keyword means that there will be no exchange of user
credentials via cookies, client-side SSL certificates or HTTP authentication
Because of this arbitrary technical limitation, if a webpage wants to make a request to to an arbitrary URL equivalent to what a native app could ("anonymous"/cookies-free, of course), it'd have to make an AJAX (or WebSockets) call to an intermediary server running native code to do so, which is what the parent is referring to as a "CORS proxy".
--
> > * Open TCP and UDP sockets
> There are websockets, which aren't the same, I'll admit. Frankly, I'm not sure I want my web pages to be able to arbitrarily open TCP/UDP sockets. (I don't really want my native apps to be able to on whim, either…)
Sure, whatever, you don't want arbitrary native apps being able to open arbitrary TCP/UDP sockets, but you're missing the point. We both agree that it should be possible to, somehow, download an FTP client and somehow configure security settings so that it can work, right? (Restricted ports and filesystem or chroot or whatever.) There's no fundamental reason browsers can't have the same security framework so that you can open an FTP client web app and somehow configure browser security settings so that it can work, right?
--
> > * Barometric sensors
> You mean like current air pressure? Are there common devices out there with these? (None of my computing devices have anything like this, for example.)
According to XKCD, "a lot of new Android phones" have a barometer sensitive enough to "actually see the pressure difference between your head and your feet."
(Obviously that's not an authoritative reference, but I think it's sufficiently addresses your question, and it's a fun article.)
> (and what would I want this for?)
What a great question, I'd love to know too!!
That's because the browser and the server have different routing tables. Or to put is more simply, the browser can see the stuff on your LAN, behind your firewall, while the server can't. The point of CORS even for anonymous requests is to prevent web pages from being able to exfiltrate stuff out from behind firewalls, so you don't have random data leaks just because someone in an organization visited some random website. (Yes, you also need them to not download and run random binaries, not have any unpatched exploits in their browser and OS, etc... security is hard.)
Now obviously native apps _can_ exfiltrate stuff out from behind firewalls. Which means that if you really care about your LAN's security you have to assume or enforce that none of the phones connecting to it have any sketchy apps installed...
Note that there is in fact discussion about having a concept of "installing" a web app that you trust sufficiently, which would relax the browser security sandbox such that you get more of the capabilities you're talking about here.
In order for this to happen, those web apps need to have every capability a native app can have, including access to the local area network, if you want to do "things that native apps do". What if I want to write an HTML5 SSH client so that I don't have to rewrite it twice for iOS/Android? An SMB client? A custom streaming protocol? An HTML Arduino IDE that can flash code over the LAN?
Ideally, a web app could simply have a manifest of permissions, present this list to the user at an appropriate time, and the user decide whether or not to grant them. Opening arbitrary TCP sockets should also be a permission, just like native apps need to add this to their manifest. Native apps already ask for permissions when installed; web apps should be required to do the same, and in return, be granted the same set of capabilities.
The idea that "web apps should be restricted" is at odds with the vision of using web apps to realize a true cross-platform app programming ecosystem.
Now it might happen that this will effectively happen as a result of convergence and standardization of browser extension APIs. It'll be interesting to see what happens there.
That said, the manifest of permissions idea is fundamentally broken in at least two related ways:
1) Most users have no rational basis on which to decide whether to grant the permission or not. In fact, I would argue this is all users, due to issue #2:
2) The permissions are either overbroad, such that pretty much any app that wants to do anything interesting asks for them (this is the "all my apps on want to be able to read my contacts and browsing history" syndrome) or there are so many of them that the list becomes way longer than any user would ever read at install time.
You example of a permission for opening arbitrary TCP sockets is an excellent case in point. As a standalone permission, what fraction of users do you think would understand what is actually being granted? Even if you restrict to computer professionals, I suspect that most would not understand the implications without a somewhat lengthy explanation of what the permission actually allows. And even then, in practice it would be rolled into some other more broad permission that would likewise not indicate the security implications of granting it.
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2011/06/permissions-for-web-appl... has some more in-depth discussion of the issues with this model.
> Native apps already ask for permissions when installed
Yes, and in practice everyone just grants whatever permissions are asked for without really even reading.
I think OP probably means a proxy server on your domain which can make arbitrary requests to a third party, in order to get around CORS restrictions:
browser <--[XHR]--> my-server <--[HTTP]--> third-partyI don't think the GP was implying that.
If you don't control the upstream content you don't necessarily control the CORS settings. Hence the need for CORS proxies to work around an ideal introduced by the major browsers in the last few years.
In the real world you may well have the right to access third party content, but in many cases you require them to expend engineering resource to perform the very simple task of enabling a simple set of headers, so end up having to proxy content.
Take Chromecast for example - it takes CORS to the extreme requiring it set on HLS manifests and .ts video files, meaning any proxy solution has to take the full cost of proxying the full video content. MP4 files don't have this restriction, nor do any browsers.
To me it very much feels like the web is splitting into two - Sites that you stumble upon and want completely sandboxed, and those you come back to repeatedly and provide enough value for you to click "yes, have my location"..
Most modern phones have a barometric (yes, air pressure) sensor included. Having semi-accurate altitude data helps the GPS receiver obtain a faster location fix, but it can be used for other things as well.
Most Android devices since maybe late 2012 have had one. It's used for enhancing GPS lock, and whatever developers can dream up. All I've heard about it being used for is a distributed air pressure sensor network used for weather prediction, tracking, etc. [0[
If you have large amounts of structured data and high performance requirements for it... well, good luck.
This is defeatable, either with `-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;` or other techniques.
> Background geolocation, background anything really
You mean, Service Workers?
> Display long lists of styled content and scroll without stalling
I could be wrong, but I think this is a Safari-specific concern. Android Chrome has never had this problem for me. In older versions of iOS, Safari was not able to execute Javascript while scrolling which could be perceived as "stalled" rendering. I'm not sure if that's what you mean, but Apple has been gradually working to allow JS execution during scroll. But they're so behind (in years) that I wonder if there are still some cases where the execution can't keep up with the scroll.
Re. "bloat" of components. I think it's important to remember everything something like paper-input is doing for _you_. As a developer, I no longer have to think about: validation, animations, a11y, keyboard, knowing all the MD spec configurations, labels, underlines, colors, fonts, typography, margins, composability, x-browser interop,... Sure, if you were implementing your own input, you could cut corners and/or leave out what you didn't need. However, if you were creating a highly reusable, highly configurable element, you'd be implementing the same amount of "bloat" yourself.
Why not? What If I want to make a material design spreadsheet app? Just a random idea, but again, the people who make basic OS-style UI elements shouldn't be judging what a "sane" app should and shouldn't do. This limits creativity.
> However, if you were creating a highly reusable, highly configurable element, you'd be implementing the same amount of "bloat" yourself.
Sure, if I implemented it in JS. Implemented natively, a MD paper-input consumes very little resources because it isn't a nested div hell with CSS and a shadow DOM.
What would be more awesome is if there were a way to, using HTML and JS, "ask" the browser to call and insert a native element and be able to interact with it. On iOS, it should be an Apple-styled element, and on Android 5.x, it should be a MD element. They should be the genuine native element inserted right in place, not a DOM hell designed to "look" like the native thing.
What troubles me is imagining a future where a vast majority of information that we consume is selected and curated by commercially driven, black box, non-neutral platforms.
I read an article recently about how Google is experimenting with removing the need to download apps by 'streaming' app content through a search box. Presumably, this is how Google search stays relevant in the post-web era where more and more information flows through walled gardens installed on mobile devices. Now, instead of re-inventing the web, shouldn't we be working towards 'fixing' the one that exists? This list provides a decent 10,000 ft overview of the problems.
Eager to hear your thoughts.
The truth is that the 'web' is really becoming the cross-platform application architecture.
Just a few years back I despised the very idea of this -- I want to program in my favorite language, not JavaScript (no matter how nice it is these days). I'd love to write applications that can act like native ones while also being cross platform (and use multiple threads at that!).
The fact that WebAssembly[1] intends to eventually add support for multi-threaded programs and languages aside from JavaScript (including GC'd ones) is amazing. Personally I believe these are the two biggest blockers for most people who would want to write an app using web technology.
Although they explicitly mention that their goal is not to replace JS in their FAQ, that IMO is more akin to a _"nothing will ever replace C"_ statement rather than a _"no apps will be written using other languages than C"_.
I expect the same to happen in the future on both desktop and mobile platforms, despite the FUD.
It's not playing catch up so much as adding powerful features without sacrificing it's core attributes.
But they are terrible when it comes to exposing the raw power and capability of a machine to web apps that the user wants to trust. They spec their API implementations by committee (and committees of committees) and they rarely implement any spec in its entirety. The web is becoming increasingly fragmented as a result.
The web is good for "web pages", but bad for "web apps". The web currently has no concept of a trusted web app.
For example, we have been waiting for years for browsers to give web apps some way to access the filesystem, and all we have is an open dialog and a file instance (and the debris of the failed filesystem api). And when will web apps (not "web pages") get TCP or UDP? The browsers will never be able to match the module ecosystem and core power of Node.
The way forward:
1. Give the power back to users. Give them a boolean way to indicate that they trust and want to install a web app.
2. If the web app is trusted and installed, give it access to Node.
In a matter of months, this could exponentially boost web apps, lighten the bloated browser codebase, keep the focus on browser rendering, and keep committee fingers off web app innovation.
That is, after all, what it was designed for. Making web pages interactive in any way beyond a <form> has always been a hack.
> give web apps some way to access the filesystem
> And when will web apps (not "web pages") get TCP or UDP?
First, if it's in a browser, there isn't much of a distinction between "web apps" and "web pages". The browser, by definition, exists as a sandbox that renders unsafe data and code. Allowing any kind of access to the filesystem or TCP or UDP will hopefully never happen.
All networked software needs to implementing security concerns as the first and highest priority, If you aren't, you're putting the people that use your software at risk.
The browser must always[1] be limited in what it an do. If you want to do more (which is fine), write a standalone application. If your favorite platform doesn't let you write such applications, complain to the vendor or change to something that isn't hostile to software development.
> the module ecosystem and core power of Node.
That ecosystem is tiny compared to what is available in /usr/lib64/. I like Javascript, but there is a lot more to computing outside that single ecosystem.
[1] Unfortunately current browsers are already over the line with what they allow pages to access.
- Left align all features
- Align icons
- Align check marks
- Consider using heavier-looking icons for supported/not-supported.
- Promote the checkmark / ex legend to the top of the page.
[1] Which isn't actually a listed browser, but it has the X next to it when viewed in Safari and the underlying caniuse.com data is for Service Workers, which Safari doesn't support.
So it is not surprised that it doesn't claim Safari can handle push notifications. As it cannot.
> Can I rely on the Web Platform features to build my app? An overview of the device integration HTML5 APIs
It's just relying on data from caniuse.com about W3C standards, but the page itself does not say anywhere that I can see that it's ignoring non-W3C browser-specific APIs. Which is rather misleading.
edit: I guess it's market share? but which measurement?
That does not mean that web based apps will (or should) replace native apps. There will always be enough applications where native will do the work better, even as processing power grows, but to say the web is going to die is just wishful thinking on the part of those who want it to die. Ain't gonna happen.
The keyword is "like".
Web apps are too slow on mobile.