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Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

> HTML has failed on a basic level, to keep up with the ways that users want to experience content, and that designers want to present content

HTML was designed to be a way to create and link documents so that someone or a machine at one end of a distributed network could access it on a different network, not become an app platform. Everything else done beyond that is a perversion of HTML.

It would be interesting if there ever was a standard app container runtime that doesn't use HTML/JS/CSS. I guess that the last serious attempt at that were Java Applets which never took off.

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Insert my endless rant that most native apps are just interactive documents, that XML tree structures are a fine way to represent application state, and that native platforms like Linux would probably be a lot better if all of their apps rendered to some kind of DOM-like primitive instead of pixel buffers.

XML/DOM representations of graphical state are a lot closer to the Unix ideal that we have in the command line. A big reason why the command line is often more powerful than a graphical interface is because the command line allows users to easily wrap around, extend, pipe, scrape, script, and translate interfaces.

HTML is the evolution of that ideal -- a statement that graphical interfaces should be as flexible and as manipulable as a command line interface.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270960

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21347067

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21498349

I think people are too hung up on the minor difference between html/xml vs json. The same folks who decry html as just for "documents" will at the same time push a "document" database because it's json. And now, we have GraphQL running on a server to turn our data into a tree shape to send to the client, but it's okay because it's json and not html...

>Everything else done beyond that is a perversion of HTML.

Here's a thread from the w3 mailing list discussing possible scripting languages for HTML back in 1995[0].

And here's Tim Berners-Lee talking about running code in HTML in 1992[1].

You're simply wrong that running code in HTML is a perversion - that was envisioned as a possibility since the beginning, it just took time to manifest.

What wasn't intended was for only one scripting language to dominate. When the script tag was released in HTML 3, the hope was browsers would support multiple languages, which is why it had a type attribute, but that never happened.

[0]https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/msg00099.html

[1]http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1992/0064.html

There was VBScript but Microsoft gave up on that idea early on. https://www.howtogeek.com/437372/what-is-vbscript-and-why-di...

Is this not the exact definition of a cowpath argument? "We didn't make it to be this way so, regardless of what people are actually using it for, we will continue to assume we're right and the users are wrong"?

If HTML is no longer being used the way it was intended, is it unreasonable to request A.) A replacement, or B.) an HTML upgrade?

You can add Adobe AIR, which was built for exactly that scenario. It flopped because people weren't going to pay when they could just use HTML 5.

That's the hard part - any such solution has to compete with the HTML/JS/CSS ecosystem for free.

> It would be interesting if there ever was a standard app container runtime that doesn't use HTML/JS/CSS.

Flutter Web is attempting something like that I suppose. Not that I think it will take off.

Even if it did take off, the slate would be clean for a while then eventually it would become bloated just like the current mess we're in.

It would be probably be a better idea to be more conservative with the adoption of new technology.

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