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Comment by Black616Angel | Hacker News Reader

> Picture using these apps offline with automatic synchronization when you’re back online. This is the essence of local-first web development – a revolutionary approach that puts users in control of their digital experience.

I had to laugh very hard at the "revolutionary approach". How is it revolutionary, if software was developed "local-first" for decades?

Techbros really do come up with the oldest ideas and call them revolutionary.

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I laugh (maniacally) every time I need to change a jinja template generating a nightmarish yaml and remember the glory days of xml with affection.

Revolutions always have been the young one's business for a reason, I guess.

XML had XML Schema and DTDs, making automatic validation a breeze.

Its only issue was that it was a massive pain to type by hand and no good GUI editors really emerged.

And some developers didn't understand the format and shoved stuff into attributes that should've been elements and vice versa.

>no good GUI editors really emerged.

In those good old times both Oxygen and XML Spy were good enough, so I even purchased a license of Oxygen for myself and never felt the money were wasted.

>And some developers didn't understand the format and shoved stuff into attributes that should've been elements and vice versa.

This happened at such scale where we can say that it was UX problem of XML itself.

lol i remember those days. most XML documents were missing DTDs and schemas (or that third type of schema whose name escapes me) and because the data structure of an XML document didnt map cleanly to lists and hashmaps you needed an ugly hacky xpath to grab whatever data you needed.

Dont even get me started on the mess that was serialisation and deserialization.

It was awful, overengineered design-by-committee mess.

This was only obvious to me in retrospect after I realized that these things didnt have to be complicated.

> or that third type of schema whose name escapes me

RRELAX NG, perhaps?

I suppose "local-first development" is a misnomer. It's really about the syncing part. Currently we have traditional applications that write data locally and therefore don't require an internet connection to work, and we have online stuff that updates a shared state "live". The "revolutionary" part would be having both of those things. It's a surprisingly hard thing to do.

The current state of the art here is git. So we're basically talking about making git automatic and easy to use for the majority of the population. That's not something we've been "doing for decades".

I can think of so many pieces of software that does that: having a local state, having a remote state, and keeping them synchronized whenever internet is available. It's how email apps work. That's how all cloud drives work, and Dropbox is more than a decade old at this point. It's how notes apps work. Etc. etc.

Really can't see how this can be regarded as a recent idea.

Just try to do simultaneous edits offline in all those "Etc. etc.", see it automatically fail, then the obvious recency might become apparent

I'm someone who has used and continues to use desktop applications like that. I'm old enough to know what "work offline" and an email "outbox" is. Those are not the same things.

The always-online apps bring a lot that is not possible with such software, even simple stuff like editing the same file at the same time. Try that with tools like Dropbox and you'll get conflicts that you need to resolve. It's totally possible to get offline software if you either give up on many features or accept complicated conflict resolution etc. The basic options are either immutability, like email, or conflict resolution, like git. This is about not making those sacrifices.

"Local first" is a misnomer and that misnomer does probably reflect the different experience of youngsters, but if you can get past that there is something new here that is interesting and challenging.

Many applications work like that, particularly ones made between 2000 and 2010. Operating systems have whole stacks of SDKs and libraries dedicated to that exact behavior (e.g., CloudKit in OS X).

Google's Keep Notes works well enough for me.

It might be helpful to read what "local first" means in this context: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

  Techbros really do come up with the oldest ideas and call them revolutionary.

Wait until they start vibe-coding these ideas.

"Let's invent a thing inventor, said the thing-inventor-inventor after being invented by the thing inventor."

— bill wurtz, 2017, in the video "history of the entire world, i guess"

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