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Comment by moldycricket | Hacker News Reader

This is just a sample of what is possible. There will always be people who use the wrong tool for the job, but that is not a reason to dismiss this.

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Who's dismissing? I love it -- and this example looks great.

It's a reason to proclaim that the people deciding on web standards are doing a horrible job.

Scripting should be removed from the web, not made ever more powerful....

That to me sounds like you're saying cars would be better off without wheels.

Yeah, god, I long for the days before Google Maps, too. Who needs that slick slippy interface when you can endlessly click arrows at the corner of a static image?

Ah, true nostalgia. Making the click, waiting for the image to download over 56k..only to realise you've loaded the wrong tile.

If anyone wants to recreate the experience, Streetmap.co.uk [1] is still going (somehow).

[1] http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=531500&y=181500&z=120&s...

It is a long term evolution. Eventually, application developers will build directly atop the accelerated graphics layers, freeing the browser to be just a basic virtual machine, and leaving HTML rendering to be just another app built atop that machine. But these things take time and there is a lot of legacy cruft that needs to work in the meantime.

Just like native apps, except the end-user no longer has control over anything.

I can't wait.

Care to elaborate? That is not the direction I pictured at all. The open standards of the web should have the opposite effect, allowing anyone to build a computer that can run the major software offerings of the time.

I do not see it really any different to how web applications are developed today, just throwing out the needless overhead. If your concerns are to be realized, it has probably already happened a long time ago.

Why people keep saying this kind of stuff?

For one, whatever Tim Berner's Lee envisoned, the web is not the simple mostly textual medium it was in 1993. Get over it.

Second, for people to love reading text on the web, there was never a better time than the present. Lots of long form text by bloggers and content providers like Medium etc, combined with a widespread interest in improved readability and good typography. Plus, the fashion/preference for "minimalist" designs also helps putting emphasis on the content, even better than some 1997 site with animated gifs and black text on grey.

The universal reply to "get over it" is "if it's a problem for me, then it's a problem". Are you sure there's no grain of truth in the complaints about today's dynamic Web? How about this critique, which is hopefully more articulate? http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2011-Nov...

Are you sure there's no grain of truth in the complaints about today's dynamic Web?

Of course there are. But no-one has really articulated an alternative vision. That post certainly doesn't.

That post's alternative vision is something that already existed not so long ago, you can learn about it in as much detail as you want...

So we throw away all scripting? No more Google Maps? Doesn't sound very realistic to me.

IMO, browser plugins were the way forward. You can have all the fancy stuff that modern computers can do, like Google Maps or even Quake Live, and at the same time most of the web can stay simple.

Well, that's a terrible idea. Why do you think so many plugins are being phased out?

Well, the Flash plugin has become less popular because many developers disliked it and decided to bet on the open web instead. IMO that was for shortsighted ideological reasons. As far as I know, browser plugins are the only way to have truly decentralized innovation on the Web. Anyone can make a plugin and offer it to users. If plugins are discouraged, then a handful of browser makers become gatekeepers of all new functionality. It may seem okay now because some browser makers are seen as good guys, like Mozilla and Google, but we all remember the time when the biggest browser maker wasn't seen as a good guy, and that can happen again.

What are your arguments against plugins? I'm curious.

Primary argument against plugins is that they have to be remade for every platform. See: the iPhone not having Flash.

What? If you want to expose new rich functionality to web apps, you need to do it separately on each platform anyway, whether it's in a plugin or in the core browser. Plugin developers seem to be okay with paying that price. The iPhone doesn't have Flash because Apple doesn't want web developers to make rich apps and divert users from the app store, not because of implementation difficulties.

Suppose that's what they did with HTML5. What would happen then?

Nobody would use it. Proprietary solutions to do what WebGL and other HTML5 features do would pop up, and people would use those.

Instead, what we've got is a situation where you can actually turn off Flash and use the majority of websites without any degradation.

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