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0 pointssimias6y ago0 comments

I'd argue that the problem isn't so much backward compatibility than being opinionated vs not. Qt knows what it's doing, knows what it isn't doing and then from there defines the perimeter of its APIs.

For better or worse the web never did that work, HTML+CSS+JS is meant to be both a way to make static websites, but also interactive e-shops, but also mail clients, but also videogames, but also ultra-heavy single-page apps like Discord etc...

And that's the greatest power of the web, but I can't see how this state of affair won't lead, one way or the other, towards a more monolithic architecture. Keeping HTML and CSS cleanly separated and JS only for the fancy stuff (but always optional!) is noble but it's a pipe dream when the use cases are so diverse. WebAssembly, or something like it, seems to be clearly the path forward.

Overall I think we should be happy too, at least it's not a closed source blob. Remember how long it took us to get rid of bloody Flash? Actually if Steve Jobs hadn't decided to drop it from iPhones I wouldn't be surprised if it had survived in common use to this day.

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joshuarubin6y ago

It's hard to identify specific decisions made by Jobs from the outside, but killing Flash on the iPhone seems like something _only_ Jobs could have done. Sure he and Adobe were in a tiff... Anyway, it's likely that this is a rare case where one person making a unilateral, perhaps tyrannical, decision benefited the whole world.

BlueTemplar6y ago

The fancy stuff can go live in apps, it has nothing to do in a browser designed for webpages first. I mean, just compare the GUIs of VLC and YouTube!

shadowgovt6y ago

But with the strong advantages of access to the Internet that a website brings (which is itself a whole bag of hard problems to solve), the appeal of building things accessible via browser user-agent (regardless of what the thing is) is huge.

It shouldn't be necessary to toss out the cookie jar, the HTTP connection handler, the XSS protection just because one wants to do something a bit different with the final rendering stage.

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