Comment by forgetfreeman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by forgetfreeman | Hacker News Reader

Pretty solid take on a roiling shitstorm that's been brewing for at least the last 15 years. One thing I strongly disagree with the author about is wanting the web to win. Of all possible outcomes the web coming out on top of the platform wars is the worst available. Simple fact of the matter is the web wasn't built for any of this shit as our bloated and still wildly insecure browsers demonstrate rather vividly. The web defaulting back to a largely static information display medium would free up so much client budget and development hours it's hard to imagine that multi-OS support for native apps wouldn't be a net savings over the long haul. Hell, just imagine the kinds of resources that would free up if forced migration of highly dynamic websites was a thing of the past (yeah I'm looking at you Drupal).

What are you suggesting complex Drupal sites be migrated to?

Most would get migrated into the void where they belong. A small handful that have real use cases would have their interactive services ported to native app. Solutions already exist for commerce and donations features, remote data entry and retrieval would need a rethink I'm guessing. As with any massive paradigm shift there'd be a cull. I strongly doubt much of value would be lost.

Do you know what Drupal is used for? Can you seriously imagine migrating that stuff to native apps?

sigh I've contributed to core and several of the most used modules in the contrib space, have built over a thousand sites with it ranging in complexity from state level nonprofits to Unicef and the ACLU, and once ran testbot for a week. I know a little about what it's for, and yes I can absolutely imagine migrating to native. 1. You'd only have to do it once. 2. The overwhelming majority of sites platformed on Drupal could easily be replaced by pure static HTML and other than a handful of back office staff bitching about social media integration nothing of note would be impacted. If you've spent any time at all in the industry you know as well as I do what the client says they need and what they actually need are orthogonal.

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