Hacker News Reader

Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

> I find it funny that web pages are trying to be native apps and many mobile apps are shipping when they're ostensibly just web pages.

Which provides some insight into what's missing from the web. It's almost good enough for most companies. They just need a little something extra so that they can "own the experience." But soon the browsers will catch up and then websites will be able to own your experience, too.

View on HN

What if I don't want corporations to own my experiences? An information-driven web with a document model is robust and can work with many different user agents. An experience-driven web with an application model is very fragile and will only be available to sighted, hearing, Mac-using people running a big 4 browser.

Who needs flash when we can have 15 competing application frameworks for the web that all just abuse the canvas as their medium, so we aren't even authoring HTML/CSS anymore?

Honest question: is abusing canvas really becoming prevalent? The only web app I've seen doing this is flipboard.

Prevalent? I don't know. I do think it's just a matter of time before some companies leverage this by providing a super simple web page developer tool a la Frontpage Extensions.

Photography studio webpage that just wants a carousel and music playing? Check.

Small companies that freak out about people stealing their inventory list? Check.

Vendor lock in for the poor souls that fall for this? CHECK.

Hmmm, maybe I'm naive, but I really don't see anything to suggest that things are headed this direction.

yeah I don't think that would be crawlable and we want seo

Then you're SOL, because web-delivered applications that own the experience will happen. Hopefully someone would come up with a better user-respecting user agent by then.

Funnily, iOS offers much better accessibility support than web. And I'd argue that many more apps use it (also Apple recently promoted apps with good accessibility support) compared to modern "web apps".

From a tech standpoint, yes. There are some pretty powerful interests that don't want to see the open web on mobile. Google and Apple get handsome cuts of all the revenue on their semi-closed platforms. Consumer demand may shift that, but I'm not holding my breath. The open web was an historical anomaly: historically the large information infrastructures have been nearly monopolized (telegraph, phone lines, cable/broadcast).

The web is an anomaly yes, but it has broader reach than any other platform in the history of mankind. Thinking that native apps will kill the web is to miss the forest for the trees. None of these proprietary platforms have the reach of the web. No computing device maker can release a credible device without web support. It doesn't matter how much money you have, you can't make your proprietary platform cross the chasm the web has crossed. Apple can't do it, even open-source Android can't do it, because Android is runtime, not a standard.

The common narrative of PC app -> Web app -> Mobile app is only superficially accurate in terms of where the tech hype was at different points. But in terms of long-term life cycles, mobile apps are much more like PC apps, and the web is something else completely different, which we've never seen before, and mark my words, it will not disappear or be superseded anytime soon.

the web is something else completely different, which we've never seen before, and mark my words, it will not disappear or be superseded anytime soon

Smalltalk environments?

That's the gist of it. The web is a file server protocol with a pseudo-Smalltalk coating.

We've seen hypertext systems in general many times before the web.

None that crossed the chasm. That's what makes the web special and unique, not the functionality.

The web ten years ago was indeed different when clean markup, separation of concerns, accessibility meant something. Nowadays it is just a mess, cannon fodder in the battle nobody asked for.

It "meant something" for a tiny fraction of web developers. The vast majority of developers in 2005 was probably either using Flash or creating something that only worked in IE (with its 85% usage share).

Yes, I totally miss the good ole' days of bitching about IE getting the CSS box model wrong, despite the fact that it was the better implementation and as soon as the standards gods deigned to bless us with 'border-box' everyone kind of pretended those threads on css-discuss never happened... Or endless bickering over the best unit to declare font-size in, because of course it made absolute sense to leave accessibility to site designers, not browser implementations... Or posturing over why 'float' was actually a valid layout concept for anything besides a block of paragraphs with images interspersed... Or the endless clearfix or image replacement hacks... Ahh yeah, the good ole' days...

Once again, what so special about mobile? Somehow I don't see webtech proponents rallying for wining the desktop or winning the smartwatches. This obsession with winning the mobile is plain stupid. Instead of wasting time implementing half-baked features which will never catch-up the native offerings and stuffing more crap into already multi-megabyte web pages how about doing some spring cleaning?

No they won't, because it would kill the web. That little bit is ownership: branding and control. There's no Adblock for their app. Their app isn't called Firefox it's Company Name. There's no dev tool for the app, so less chance to find out all the insecure ways it siphons my data. They control updates, so their ActiveX-style monstrosities are always going to be displayed the same. Get the idea?

Perhaps the choice lies outside of the actual functionality of the web itself but instead in the OS and browsers.

Consider someone who ships their iOS app that is basically just a web page instead of using a web page. For doing this, they get two benefits that are not really related to the web. One, they get an icon to tab from the home screen to launch their app, instead of going to Safari and then going to their webpage. Two, they get to avoid having to go through Safari, which one could speculate is something Apple was already wanting them to avoid as it allows Apple to create a better walled garden (not to say Apple is the only one who does this, I'm only pointing them out because I used iOS in my example).

How would a change/upgrade in web standards allow for the web app to compete with the iOS app housing a web app on these two fronts?

Just in case you're not aware, you can already make web apps in iOS have a icon on the home screen. See https://developer.apple.com/library/safari/documentation/App...

+1 thanks for that!

Does anyone have a link for something similar for Android phones?

https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/installtoho...

HTM5 appcache to the rescue!

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/appcache/beginner/

It's rad.

Rad is definitely not my experience.

I've spent A LOT of time trying to get my site's appcache functionality to the point where it's barely usable. Probably more time than all of its users would have spent downloading the resources it was supposed to cache. It has more gotchas than anything else I've ever experienced.

This is incredibly accurate: http://alistapart.com/article/application-cache-is-a-doucheb...

I really don't want them to "own the experience." I want their brochures to stay nicely sandboxed in a browser where they don't invade my computer and try to tell me what I can do with it.

Brochures are documents, nobody has a problem with putting documents on the web. Also, mobile apps are sandboxed already on all major platforms.

Right, I meant it as something of an insult. I'm fine with documents on the web. I'm fine with interactive documents on the web. I'm not fine with "web apps" that try to jump out of the browser, opening windows, redefining control-key sequences, breaking bookmarks, "open in new tab", and the back button, and otherwise interfering with my ability to control my own experience on the web.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com