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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

This view is completely backwards and I'm baffled by its popularity.

Given that even newspaper websites are now built as applications, we should accept that the web is an application platform (with one of those applications being displaying articles) and rework HTML as an application display language. And we need to start relying on JS more.

(Specifically, we should reimplement most traditional HTML elements and CSS as web components on top of a basic core web runtime. Then we could have a small standard for the core web that was practical to implement - just a very minimal layout engine and a JS interpreter - and everything else could be in the "component library" rather than something browser makers had to implement by hand. And then pages that want to use their own components or some other third-party components - which is most pages these days - could skip all that cruft)

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I get this viewpoint from a software architecture level, but that is also effectively the death of the open web. When every website is an opaque app, even often requiring a client-side optimizing compiler that builds an arbitrary binary in order to load (WASM), we can say goodbye to things like search engines and typically also hyperlinks. The rise of social media has already balkanized the web a lot, where almost all content is locked behind a login screen.

This could be what we want, but I can't help but think about what we've lost.

Search engines already run JavaScript to understand the pages they're indexing. Android apps manage to deep-link into each other effectively despite being applications. Designing tools and standards that work well with what we have is far better than trying to hold back the tide.

hes saying you could freely link and iframe other sites, now you cant. the literal "open" web.

Yep, and accessibility will be a nightmare.

Just as it was with Java and Flash.

That's because you're looking at it from the perspective of what the developers of those news websites want, rather than what the users of those news websites want.

The users want to get a document, not an app. That's what the web was made for, documents.

The users want to read an article, I'm not sure the average user really cares if it's delivered as a document or an app

Users do want to find the article via a search engine, and the search engine does prefer the article to be a document, rather than an app.

he make a de good point

As a user I want to be able to save the page and read it later.

Admittedly even with .war format and other attempts, this was possible only for a brief time. Now we have a crop of readability converters because even print to pdf is useless most of the time.

The user minds when the app gets in the way of the document.

Those apps were the article is hidden between ads and newsletter/subscription pop-ups?

The apps are mire likely used to hinder ad blockers than benefit the reader.

What feature of an article needs an app?

> Given that even newspaper websites are now built as applications, we should accept that [...]

So because some websites do shitty things, we should all throw out the standard way of displaying information on the web? Guide me through that line of reasoning. Why are newspaper websites, out of all the websites, the ones which should determine how we do things?

> Why are newspaper websites, out of all the websites, the ones which should determine how we do things?

My point is that if there was any category of websites for which a "document" model would work, it would be newspaper websites. When even those take an "application" approach, it's time to admit that the "document" model is a failure.

There is no "document" or "application" model, the distinction is mostly just vibes.

News sites are meant to be read, therefore they are "documents." They are also applications, because all websites, even static ones, are also applications. Once you add hyperlinks and external resources, it ceases to be purely a document.

Adding a script tag to an HTML page doesn't transform it from one to the other.

Agree that it's all vibes-based, but look at how the newspapers understand their own sites - in particular, what they consider to be an "article", how they edit those articles, and the pipeline from that to the article being rendered in the end user's browser.

Many websites have no business being a full-blown application.

The web is getting smaller and smaller, being dominated by the bigger players (Google, Microsoft, Apple, et. al) for whom pushing opaque web standards and "applications" benefit only them as gatekeepers.

While it's still entirely possible for people to still build websites, search engines like Google don't prioritize them - leading them to never being discovered. 90% of the web is still the 'small' web and we can't ever discover them because they're not being indexed by Google (why should they? Most of them don't include Google's tracking js scripts ['analytics']).

The web was never supposed to be like this. It's turned into a massive surveillance engine for the big corporations.

I'll leave this here: https://wiby.me

> I'll leave this here: https://wiby.me

I’m still not entirely sure what this is, but I visited, hit “Surprise Me”, and then spent a couple hours listening to/enjoying the retro-looking pirate radio site I got sent to, so, thanks

> This view is completely backwards and I'm baffled by its popularity.

It's a completely valid view, and none of it is backwards.

What's backwards is trying to bend a system barely capable of displaying static content to create apps.

at that point just learn a programming language man. the inception like dreams within dreams within virtual machines running other virtual machines will never stop because CPU power will always increase

I know plenty of programming languages, I'm happy with them, what I want to cut out is the sub-Turing tarpit that is CSS.

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