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Comment by mattgreenrocks | Hacker News Reader

It's because the Web is a giant pile of hacks upon hacks. It is the ultimate manifestation of New Jersey design philosophy. Systems can only be as conceptually sound as their underpinnings allow. In this case, the broken design of the Web forces everything built on top of it to be a ridiculous mix of HTML/CSS/JS.

Users not closing their tags? It's OK, we'll complicate the parser to accommodate them. Users want to interact with what should be static documents? No problem, we'll throw a scripting language in there. Users want to interact with hardware peripherals? OK, we'll just expose that.

The real tragedy is how much of systems research has died at the hands of this crappy sentiment of Good Enough that pervades the Web. Literally everything the Web touches gets infected with Good Enough.

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I upvoted you, but I disagree with you.

The Web is built on a system of hacks, but those hacks are usually temporary and we can ultimately ignore most of them eventually. I was writing JavaScript back in '98, it is much easier now (and we have CoffeeScript to make it even easier!). Browser incompatibilities are slowly going away (and we have jQuery to make it even easier!). Things that used to be hard, like organizing an application to take keyboard input and respond to property changes, are now easy with things like Ember (and soon EmberUI will be out of alpha, and common things like searchable selects, buttons, date pickers, etc., will be easier) and other JS frameworks.

I would reword it to "Good Enough For Now", because things do get fixed after the cool kids have kinda hacked around it for a while.

Why should we have to hack around it?

This is exactly the sort of defeatism and learned helplessness I was alluding to.

We've accepted this crappy universal platform because it distributes software well. Despite being in a discipline where we can easily change the tools to work better for us, we just sit here and take it.

We've accepted this crappy universal platform because it is universal. Replacing something that is used by literally Billions of people is decidedly non-trivial and takes _decades_.

Not to mention that "because it distributes software well" is stated as if it isn't a huge deal. Has anything ever distributed anything so well, so cheaply, and so accessibly as the internet distributes web software?

We've accepted this crappy universal platform because it distributes software well.

Given that until very recently, the overwhelming majority of software consumers were also software producers, one can see how this attitude would be very attractive. It's New Jersey all the way down.

Yeah, but it's still hacks underneath. Does building a UI in HTML, CSS, and JS feel right to you? It's awful.

I think you meant the "Internet" is a pile of hacks not just the web.

BTW I used to work on OSI based networking* - so I have seen solidly designed networking.

But some times "good enough for jazz" wins out over a more robust solution Beta vs VHS for example.

* Update apart from sprints X.400 offering that was rubbish

I upvoted you and I agree with you.

On my own web site, I'm on a hunt for the remnants of any CSS and javascript (mostly google site metrics blurbs) to leave only pristine and validating HTML5.

With links that work.

You could always use Java applets. These would solve a number of the problems you describe, but introduce a whole new set of problems.

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