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Comment by comex | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, when I clicked the link, I got stuck on some JavaScript spinner and had to refresh to view the text.

I can't even read the text. I'm guessing it's something about "over-complicating web development" or something similar?

It's a thread, started about 2004-ish, apparently updated through 2011-ish, complaining that people should use native apps instead of web apps. It starts with the premise that using HTML to implement an application is abusive, since it was developed as a document display language, not an app framework.

They focus a lot on E-Mule as a non-HTML-based, native web app. (someone else eventually points out that it doesn't fit the customary definition of "web app").

E-Mule isn't a web app at all, it's just an Internet application. The fact that we have so confused the Internet and the WWW, to the point that even people complaining about WWW conflate it with the Internet, is a fucking tragedy.

I think that their argument (translated from rant) is basically that the web should be used for documents, and that we should build some other internet-based technology to implement applications on top of. It doesn't seem like there was a whole lot of justification beyond "this isn't what HTML was designed for", "Javascript bad", and "native app good".

Sadly, the original wiki fell prey to JavaScript. What used to be one of the cleanest, simplest, easiest-to-use sites no longer really functions, and it's all due to trying to due in the client what should be done on the server.

Cunningham wants to improve on the original Wiki and created a Federated Wiki. The c2 wiki was ported to it and this is the result.

It's rare and depressing to see a page so fatally infected with javascript overengineering that not even Google's cache managed to rescue the content.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:u3lFxVi...

I think it's a bit slow because it appears to load a file (names.txt) containing all of the names of every article in the wiki every time you load a page.

If you click a link to load a new article, it loads all of the names again.

I guess it depends on what how your browser behaves. Using Firefox, the second request is conditional (using If-Modified-Since), so the server actually sends a 304 Not Modified response instead of the names list.

My mistake - I was watching the site in Chrome dev tools and forgot that the 'disable cache' box was checked.

Yeah same, I was left wondering whether it was joke...

Archived copy:

https://archive.is/jFhIq

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