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Comment by interactivecode | Hacker News Reader

I love how forgiving the web is. These days you can get strictness with typescript and the like, which is great for businesses and work. But the forgiving nature of html and css and even javascript has contributed to so much adoption. Plus grew one of the most important things in an platform the ecosystem itself. Seeing rust slow down with piles of crates and fall into the same issues, js and npm has, perhaps its not a language problem but a ecosystem size problem. Larger user base === larger problems

If you really want pedantic strictness and perfection, native applications are the place to work. But it isnt always better.

And the web is fast, like really fast in rendering highly markedup text layouts. Just because everyone uses a frontend framework for “maintainability” doesn’t mean the engine is slow.

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I do appreciate all of what you’ve said but the author of this piece is actually mistaken.

The browser isn’t actually processing the string “chucknorris” and forgiving incorrectly provided hex codes, which is a common misconception.

What actually happens within the rendering pipeline is that the full literal string (in this case, “chucknorris”) is parsed, and the browser attempts to render the tag in the colour of blood in hope of receiving the mercy that Chuck Norris doesn’t have.

As said, it’s a common misconception and I’m glad I could clear it up before he reads this.

And, inevitably, the next generation [0] comes along and use the colour without having any idea of who Chuck Norris even was.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461264

This will keep His spirit alive, like an Old God who is fed by our unknowing adherence to traditions, hanging glass baubles on Christmas trees in a pale reflection of hanging the heads of our sacrificed enemies, yet still providing a drop of sustenance to the sleeping Gods.

The web solved distribution and that's why the web won. Click on a link see a page. Click on a link open an app. The alternative was downloading a .exe from questionable origin over an unreliable dial-up connection. App stores have become hugely successful since and if Microsoft had invented the mobile app model in the 90s (sandboxing and 1 click install process, like flatpak on linux) that model would probably have won instead of the web app. The web was incredibly buggy and horrifically slow for 2 decades, but there was no alternative so it won by default.

> I love how forgiving the web is

I have completely opposite opinion. This "forgiveness" comes at a cost:

- unexpected behavior instead of an early crash

- hard to treat the platform seriously for mission critical tasks

- makes it common to have many ways to solve the same problem

Exactly, no bank or payment system would ever offer services on the internet. How can a store operate in this environment! Never gonna happen. Impossible for mission critical tasks.

The person you’re replying to said “hard to consider”, they didn’t say it was “impossible for”. There is an infinity of difference.

Presumably banks and payments systems aren’t using web technologies (one would hope) to do the actual payments and transfers. They use them as an interface to other systems in other languages. And most of them tend to push you hard to use their apps, bank websites are often subpar.

Pigs can fly, given enough thrust.

> And the web is fast, like really fast in rendering highly markedup text layouts. Just because everyone uses a frontend framework for “maintainability” doesn’t mean the engine is slow.

Yes and no. Many many non trivial things becomes very slow if you stick naïve ways with larger amounts for visual elements. It bites hard, because even naïve ways of doing things require quite some time for complex UIs, and very often, the roadblock requires to redo most if not all of the work.

I don't love how forgiving the web is. We would all spend far less time debugging painful HTML/CSS/JS issues if the web was stricter. I think several billion man-hours would have been saved and human civilization probably more advanced. Also health-insurance costs would be reduced and web-developer lifespan likely increased thanks to less blood pressure.

(Don't think the Rust analogy really holds. npm is worse than Cargo. Of-course things could be better - a blessed standard extensions library: `stdx` with a quarterly update cycle and the crate nightmare will be solved)

Having worked on large web project and large swift macos projects, Ive spend about equal time learning the painful details and ins and outs of platform specific quirks and issues. The only difference is I guess that the web gives you the option of avoiding types. While in swift there is no opting out

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