Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

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One aspect of this that I haven't heard people get into very much: the idea that a lot of people have, including (probably) most developers at Mozilla and many web developers such as myself, is for the web platform to be a ubiquitous way to deploy applications.

The idea is that JavaScript allows a relatively safe way to do that in a sandboxed environment (the browser) that is available on almost every computer.

The developers who really want the web to just be a bunch of static HTML are actually inhibiting that vision of a web platform. Because if disabling JavaScript were to become popular, that takes away that capability of web browsers to run applications. The conversation would go from something like "we can use JavaScript and this application will run for anyone who has a new version of Firefox, Chrome, or IE10/11, or Safari" to "we can deploy our application to the latest browsers, but we will have to first present a screen asking users to enable JavaScript on our site" or something along those lines. It goes from being a ubiquitous cross-platform solution to one that will only run for people who like JavaScript.

JavaScript in the browser is by far the best option we have now and in the foreseeable future for easily deploying applications across different types of operating systems and even devices.

Its amazing to me how many people don't appreciate that goal or really take it into account.

I still completely disagree making the web an application platform. Because of the absurd HTML5 cult, many websites are obtaining unpredictable and inconsistent behavior. The difficulty of explaining it to my old parents is increasing day by day. Moreover, browsers are getting fatter unlimitedly and only a few vendors can survive and develop them. It gives browser vendors special privileges. As we are experiencing now, no one can stop this "Disable JavaScript" removing. How can people say this is "open" movement? The good old web is dying.

The web should be words and documents first (I think this page is worth reading http://justinjackson.ca/words.html). It's too late to say but if you want a sandboxed application platform, develop it out of the web. I still believe the plug-in was not a that bad idea, not the best idea though. At least you can disable it anytime and you have freedom of choice.

I suspect that the back button will be eliminated next. Because it collapses most web applications and "user experience".

If the web want to become a perfect application platform, all virtue of the web will be lost.

Good old web? What's that? The one with dancing baby gif? Or the old ARPANet?

Web has always been about managing documents in one way or the other. Now those documents are interactive and interesting to watch and listen.

I mean, if my old chem book had cool animations I could tinker with I'd probably be having fun with it right now. I don't understand the outcry for GOW. It's still around and you can still make those sites, but they are usually hard to read (no fancy column layout to make it easy on the eyes) and you have to be a great writer to really engage the audience.

Going back to GOW won't make bad writters instantly better. No more than returning to 8-bit graphic won't instantly make all games better.

I just want to mention that the order of operations here was that the web took the world by storm overnight and application developers said "there is a turning complete language in the standard, lets use it for programs rather than document scripting".

It didn't start out as lets make an application platform that can be accessed via url, it was make a document format (html) and share them over a network protocol (http) and provide scripting with javascript, and when everyone and their moms PC had that, developers started saying "can't we make that into a full blown application platform?" (besides failed experiments like java plugins or flash as an application framework)

I really wish we had just let html be documents and made a real remote-access application framework to work along side it, rather than having your program be 2 - 3 tags of html and 5MB of js. I'd much rather be sharing a qml application than an html5 one, because the latter was ground up designed to be a full featured interactive graphical interface program.

That would actually be neat, if browser engines included a qml parser and could load qml files as programs in the browser window frame. It is just extended javascript after all.

In addition to traditional client-server webapps, what about making local-only apps that just happened to be written in HTML, JS, and CSS? Possibly with a package manager run by the browser?

http://diveintohtml5.info/offline.html

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