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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Web APIs are in essence becoming an abstraction layer between OS and applications. It's not just about browser anymore. Browser is just one of the host for these APIs. In next decade or so, we should have all the power built in to standards that eliminates pretty much any advantage that native application can possibly have - even for heavy duty 3D gaming and offline video editing scenarios. Web APIs will and should become the standard way of developing apps across platforms. There is neither a theoretical reason that this is impossible or any other viable alternative agreeable among OS providers.

There is nothing to concede or regret about. It's just how things evolve. Get over it.

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> Web APIs are in essence becoming an abstraction layer between OS and applications.

Terrible ones at that. In native applications you can bypass abstraction layers when you need it. In a browser you are restricted to a almost comically crippled version of what any native APIs provide.

Look at the <canvas> API. It's fairly modern, and yet I can't even turn off premultiplied colors, which I would need for doing even semi-decent image processing.

server sockets? udp? no dice.

even the most primitive file management? with the file API i can open individal files now. But can I grant a website access to some cordoned-off subtree of the filesystem? No. Which in turn gives rise to "store everything in the cloud" mentality, because there are no alternatives.

> yet I can't even turn off premultiplied colors

What are those? If you're talking about alpha, that can be bypassed.

> server sockets? udp? no dice.

The web platform doesn't allow protocols which bypass its security model, sure. But you do have other ways to communicate, WebSocket (over TCP) and WebRTC (over UDP).

> But can I grant a website access to some cordoned-off subtree of the filesystem?

Not yet, but you do have your own filesystem.

> But you do have other ways to communicate, WebSocket (over TCP) and WebRTC (over UDP).

which brings us back to the crippled versions of the native APIs.

Well, there are some security restrictions, yes. But for most web applications they are not an issue.

> In next decade or so, we should have all the power built in to standards that eliminates pretty much any advantage that native application can possibly have

Agreed. I was just watching this talk the other day called 'Making web apps appy' froom Chrome Dev Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbuLq4f6DGQ

It talks about a lot of new incoming features, like push notifications from the browser, adding icons to home screen directly, offline access, etc.

Those features have all launched; see: http://blog.chromium.org/2015/03/chrome-42-beta-push-notific...

  > Web APIs will and should become the standard way of
  > developing apps across platforms

God forbid. There are few lamer things than those Web APIs. Why do you think the gazzilion of frameworks exists, if not to work around all the things broken? And take a look at the web in 2005 and now, see what real progress was made. Yep, we got a bunch of half-baked APIs, which will never mature, because all the crowd already run forwrad to tick another checkbox.

> Why do you think the gazzilion of frameworks exists, if not to work around all the things broken?

Actually, most frameworks don't work around anything.

You mean, RPC, CORBA, DCOM, XML-RPC, SOA,....?

As someone has written on his tweeter account "Web APIs are hipster RPCs".

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