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Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the OP's view at all, I have to admit.

JS and HTML are about the only things offering freedom on the internet these days.

Well, when I want internet I launch browser. When I need something else, I launch an app. More likely than not it gets data from some web server via HTTP and in JSON. It may even use bits of HTML for some views. Who cares. I don't get this obsession to defeat native on mobiles. Like don't get at all. Some dark thoughts start to creep in: maybe that's just some lazy webdevs who see mobile as new hotness but cannot be bored to learn native try to pull the only thing they know into that space? If embeded programming will be the new hotness, will we see the same? Why complain about developers developing for Android and iOS, but not metion those developing for Windows or OS X? And throwing half-baked (at best) features so just some capabilities can be checked on the HTML-on-mobile laundry list won't make them more fun to work with. How's that offline web apps thing going?

>How's that offline web apps thing going?

it was going just fine until apple disabled it in iOS7

but despite that setback, google continues to bank its entire business on offline web apps.

Essentially every Android phone or tablet permits side-loading of apps, and installing third-party app directories ("stores"). People may not use such very much, but the freedom is still there.

It annoys me when the internet and the www so obviously get conflated. The internet is pretty much built on open standards, and open TCP/IP implementation exist for the most obscure of hardware, while HTML and JS are what I'd like to call de facto non-standard.

I'm not conflating the two by any means. Two of the internet's shining sources of freedom are HTML and JavaScript especially when compared to the walled gardens of app stores.

That doesn't preclude other sources and as you've noted, HTML and JavaScripts are Web technologies which are of course a subset of... the internet! Besides, these days not all IP packets are transited equally.

> I'm not conflating the two by any means. Two of the internet's shining sources of freedom are HTML and JavaScript especially when compared to the walled gardens of app stores.

As far as I'm concerned, you are comparing two relatively small and often overlapping subsets of internet based technology, and you are making assumptions about the internet as a whole based on that comparison. I don't mean to say that you don't understand the difference between the words, but saying that HTML/JS offers the most freedom seems to ignore the less restrictive technologies it is built on.

Surely, the ability to use an open source software stack to create a socket connection and send arbitrary data to a different machine across the network offers more freedom than HTML/JS in a general sense of the word.

As for not all IP packets being transited equally, I'd say that it's more the result of internet freedom than it is of any sort of restrictive policiy. The way to stop it is either a more restrictive law, or an inconvenience great enough to get people to vote with their feet.

Whatever freedom that is, it is not a freedom of choice:

1) markup languages: 1 choice - HTML 2) client-side scripting languages: 1 choice - JS.

PS: please don't tell me about transpilation, it's crap.

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