And something would replace them, and the same problems would happen because the fundamental problem is not caused by some technological decisions, but stems from human nature.
That a cross-platform application distribution platform might have arisen anyway is beside the point. It'd have been nice to keep that separate from the locked-down hypertext platform that keeps the user in control. We've lost the latter in gaining the former, rather than having both.
[EDIT] I'm with you on humans being the problem over technology in general, but in this particular case I think there were technical reasons that Web 1.0 was destroyed in the creation of Web 2.0 and we were left with one crappy platform that constantly betrays and tricks its users rather than two, at least one of which isn't capable of betraying its users the way this one does. We're where we are because no-one treated Javascript (or anything else with its capabilities and liberties in the browser) as the fundamentally terrible idea and permanent trust-ruiner that it was. It's inherently and unavoidably a security disaster for the Web, not in terms of secure communication between client and server or whatever, but in terms of practical personal security for the users and their data.
You assume that HTML would have survived in the same world as this hypothetical cross-platform app ecosystem. I think you are mistaken and you can ask Gopher fans how well it works out when your platform's capabilities are completely subsumed by a more powerful platform.
If the W3C and the major browser vendors had announced an intention to stagnate and never move beyond basic hypertext documents, either another set of people would have forked and moved on without them or a full replacement would have sprung up.
I also don't think HTML has actually stagnated, though. HTML+CSS+JS is a solution, and it's changed a lot over the years. The HTML piece has experienced the smallest set of core changes, but that's because it already does what it needs to. Adding a modern file upload element might be nice, but it's not necessary. (Also the behavior of upload on the client side is really a browser choice. Browsers could make this a lot prettier without changing HTML at all.)
Like x86 assembly is, sure. Though way less well-suited to its modern purpose than that is. It's alive by accident and momentum, purely.
If it did what we needed it to do we wouldn't have burned who knows how many (tens of?) thousands of person-hours creating half-complete solutions to its various plain-as-day shortcomings. Input wrappers, table sorters, sequential image viewers, and so on. We did finally get video but it's still usually wrapped in custom UI driven by JS. It's not complete and featureful enough to exist as a good rich document format without JS (due to its long stagnation) but is also really far from being a good choice for laying out and describing applications (because it was never meant to be).
Agree that browser vendors are the ones who'd have to fix all this. The time for that passed a long time ago, of course. I just think it'd be nice to have a hypertext document network that doesn't have on-client spying as a first-class, built-in feature that you have to go way out of your way to even partially avoid. Creating Javascript and giving it such wide access was what killed any hope of that. I consider that the original sin of the modern web, that the platform itself is fundamentally and irreparably insecure (from the end user's perspective).
Heck, even if browsers always showed you the data they were about to send, split out by field, just base64 encode what you don't want them to know you know and give it an innocuous field name like, "session_id". Even better, piggyback off of legitimate fields with zero-width-character encoded data. Where there is any signal at all, there is a way to hide extra information.
- Connected people from all around the world
- Empowered small businesses
- Is very pro-charity (e.g. "birthday" charity donations)
- Allowed people to organize themselves online (groups)I just think the world would be very different without Facebook and the other social networks.
Moreover, he's right. JS would have to be fundamentally crippled (no network activity at all) to enforce this. And if you did that, someone would have built equivalent functionality because people wanted it. In fact someone did build an equivalent, actually multiple: ActiveX, Flash, Java Applets.