Comment by jgon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jgon | Hacker News Reader

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That exact quote is from a more recent talk of his, but he does mention the web and his current distaste for the design principles it embodies. I would encourage you to still watch the talk as it his criticism of the web is an incredibly small portion of the overall talk.

I wish that you had included more substance in your criticisms so I could have either agreed with you, disagreed, or explained my interpretation of his remarks. I will say that I think Kay explicitly agrees with the principle of least privilege (Rule of Least Power according to wikipedia) and calls that out in his talk. I see no way in which the ever-enlarging html,css, and javascript standards embody what Berners-Lee was talking about, especially when they still don't offer nearly the functionality that an OS offers currently. You can tell this because there are really only 4 organizations capable of creating a full browser and they happen to be mostly the largest tech corporations on the planet. If you need those kinds of resources to be able to implement the web today, how can this ever be considered "Least Power"? I suspect that in 10 years the W3C will have added so much more functionality to the various standards in an attempt to make them somewhat at parity with native development that browsers will collapse under their own weight as they try to implement what is basically an OS (this really became explicit when Chrome started using processes to "protect" tabs. Sound familiar?).

The web as it exists today is a huge pile of hodge-podge conflicting standards, none of which are remotely close to offering the level of development performance for apps rather than pages that you can get with any desktop toolkit. Alan is fully behind the "idea" of the web, but is taking the long-term, and I believe correct, view that this cannot continue as it is and we would be well served by trying do something about it by conscious effort rather than evolving half-heartedly in that direction.

I don't think your response addresses the principle of least power. That it takes millions of lines of code to create a web browser is a separate issue.

The principle of least power basically means that you should convey meaning across the web using the least expressive language or abstraction possible. The reason is that you want give the client more choices to interpret the data/content, rather than forcing it to correspond.

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html

Google, or any other search engine, would not be possible without the principle of least power. Mobile phones wouldn't have been able to use the web if the semantics were over-fitted for specific devices.

I've heard what is essentially Kay's argument from other sources too. Some computer scientist at Adobe (may have even been one of the founders) lamented that the web wasn't build on PDF. PDF is a Turing complete language that can describe any page layout.

Certainly after one has messed with CSS enough, you can see why he would say that (aside from the obvious favoritism). But it is terrible idea, in that it overfits content for specific devices, and is a vector for malware, etc. Once you are Turing complete, it's very hard to avoid these pitfalls.

Anyway, as I recall, Kay is making essentially the exact same argument as the Adobe guy, and the way he said it in that talk (Programming and Scaling, thanks below) displays astonishing ignorance for such a brilliant guy.

If Kay is right, then he should just create a web that is based on a VM. And then he can see how far it goes. It will never go anywhere because it will be broken by design.

That we are developing more VMs now for the web doesn't negate the point. The web should be layered; each kind of content should choose the least powerful channel to transmit it. If you need arbitrary code, then the least powerful abstraction is a Turing complete VM. But you don't need a Turing machine to display a blog post.

And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web. However much of a hodgepodge the web is, it can and will continue to improve incrementally, whereas the a GUI toolkit no matter how technically superior can never cross the chasm to ubiquity, wring your hands though you might.

Well I'm not wringing my hands, and I don't think you really have the ability to comment on my body language. Let's keep this debate focused solely on the contents of the talk.

The ubiquity and deployability of the web is not an inherent quality of the design of html, css or javascript. The ubiquity and deployability seem to me to be largely due to the internet which is one of the comments that Kay makes. People confuse the workings of the internet with the workings of the web. Right now we send documents that are interpreted, but there is nothing to say we can't send objects which are "interpreted" (or JITed more likely). But his point in the talk I posted was that the amount of accidental complexity that is piling up on the web as we speak (and which will only get worse and worse) will eventually collapse upon itself. You can already see the complexity of things like javascript and css increasing as the web attempts to offer applications, not just documents, and doing this by having a committee standardize high-level behaviour like layout seems to be a poor approach in the long run.

Most of the talk is focused on thinking in the long-term as well as working to decrease the complexity of the software edifices we are currently creating, before they become too large to improve in any revolutionary way.

Who knows, maybe the next web will be built on top of the web, the way the web was built on top of the internet. The point of his comments in the talk is that we should explicitly think about the design of what we are building before we rush off to pile up code.

You'll have to forgive me not watching the talk yet. I'm not in a position to comment on Kay's entire vision.

My comment was aimed squarely at the refrain that we've been hearing from serious engineers for a long time about the utter unsuitability of the web for apps. I find this tiresome because technology doesn't win by being better, it wins by being adopted. Of course there's no technical reason we can't have a better basis than the web for internet apps. It's not about technical limitations, it's about the adoption curve. The perfect cross-platform GUI toolkit in 1992 would have still failed if it required you to write C++ to render your class schedule.

The fact that any person with almost no technical expertise can access an app from any computer they sit down at anywhere in the world without requiring installation is actually an amazing achievement that far outweighs the kludginess of the apparatus.

I am enjoying this part of the discussion. One of the things that struck me a few years ago was how the design of the web was so heavily oriented around trying to reproduce the print media industry in a browser. Thus, we get the "markup" of HTML, which provides layout at the expense of structure. Later on, we added CSS which ideally should provide layout, but bad habits learned at an early age or provided by tools that came about in the 90s still haven't caught up in many cases to this day.

There's no concept of "line 4 of chapter 3 of book X" in the web, at least not down at its core. You have to shim it in with anchor tags or something similar, and as a result we don't have ubiquitous browser apps that let me highlight a snippet of text in a book, write some notes in the margin (example: "this is a reference to Hamlet's soliloquy"), and then on a whim search for all of Noam Chomsky's (or whoever's) notes on Hamlet, or perhaps search for all public notes on this book in the context of Hamlet. The lack of structure means that everything's this haphazard soup of markup, with the focus being so much on how it looks that structure of the text and the relationship between parts gets lost. I'm not sure the "semantic web" will make up for that lack, but it's probably a good example of how the "next web will be built on the bones of this one" (to paraphrase someone else's comment in this thread).

The web can, and will continue to accumulate stuff. You can't clean up a mess by accumulating more stuff.

There is no technical reason why a proper GUI framework couldn't be as ubiquitous as HTML+CSS+JS+SVG+etc, except that historically it didn't happen that way. It's definitely not inconceivable that somebody will build Kay's VM vision as an abstraction layer on top of web technologies, so that at least we no longer have to deal with the mess in each and every web application separately. If such a VM becomes popular enough we can implement said VM directly instead of on top of existing web technologies.

> You can't clean up a mess by accumulating more stuff.

You can't clean up a mess by adding layers, but you can replace layers (eg. you can add web sockets and start driving real time apps that way). Therefore incremental improvement is possible essentially forever.

> There is no technical reason why a proper GUI framework couldn't be as ubiquitous as HTML+CSS+JS+SVG+etc, except that historically it didn't happen that way.

Agreed. However it's not just accidental either. The web is many things to many people. It's not like cross-platform GUI toolkits failed for lack of trying, but the fact is that they could not reproduce the advantages that the web had in the very beginning. Specifically, it was comically easy to create content and even a browser on any platform in those early days. Obviously over the next decade web tech was severely abused to shoehorn application functionality where it was never intended, and ends up being more complex in the long run. However the number and utility of the dead simple documents is absolutely massive. That, combined with a defacto standard for creating server apps without installation that is perfectly accessible to a layman (theoretically with any disability as well) was the wedge that GUI toolkits never came close to having.

Your idea about building a new abstract layer on top of existing web technologies and then reimplementing it natively is the most credible idea I've heard about how the web could be supplanted, and I certainly wouldn't bet against that happening over the coming decades. However I think the web should be a textbook example of how worse is better is not just a conciliatory platitude for disgruntled engineers, but as an actual requirement for certain classes of technology to gain critical mass.

I used to think differently, but my time on HN has persuaded me that I'm wrong. I now agree with you.

I do miss the "Write it according to the specs and publish it, and anyone on any browser, any OS, any machine, any display type, can access it" attitude. Some people really do need to re-learn the universality of the www, instead of fencing off content inside apps. (Why do newspapers insist on really poor online versions, and mobile versions, and app versions?)

>And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web.

Actually there are more Windows installations than are internet users.

(If you count mobile phones the numbers might skew a little, but the vast majority of those on third world countries are not used for the web anyway).

Perfect is the enemy of good.

If we'd waited for perfect we'd never have linux, we'd still be waiting on hurd. If we'd waited for perfect we'd never have the internet and the web, we'd still be waiting on xanadu.

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