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0 pointsjauntywundrkind1y ago0 comments

These are all the views of a fossil. Maybe some truth, historically, but years out of date.

Want an offline app? Possible for a long time, build a local-first app. Don't want to build a client-server system? Fine, build an isolated webapps. There's so many great tools for webdev that get people going fast, that are incomparably quick at throwing something together. It's just bias and ignorance of an old crusty complainy world. This is a diseased view, is reprehensible small minded & aggressively mean, and it's absurd given how much incredibly effort has been poured into making HTML and CSS incredibly capable competent featureful fast systems, for shame: torturing a poor, overburdened document display engine into pretending it's a sane place for apps to run

The web has a somewhat earned reputation for being overwhelmed by ads, which slow things down, but today it feels like most native mobile apps are 60MB+ and also have burdensome slow ads too.

There aren't really any tries to go full in on the web. We have been kind of a second system half measure, for the most part, since Pre WebOS gave up on mobile (since FirefoxOS never really got a chance). Apps have had their day and I'm fine with there being offerings for those with a predeliction for prehistoric relics, but the web deserves a real full go, deserves a chance too, and the old salty grudges and mean spirits shouldn't obstruct the hopeful & the excited who have pioneered some really great tech that has both become the most popular connected ubiquitous tech on the planet, but which is also still largely a second system and not the whole of the thing.

The web people are always hopeful & excited & the native app people are always overbearingly negative nellies, old men yelling at the cloud. Yeah, there's some structural issues of power around the cloud today, but as Molly White's recent XOXO talk says, the web is still the most powerful system that all humanity shares that we can use to enrich ourselves however we might dream, and I for one feel great excitement and energy, that this is the only promise I see right now that shows open potential. (I would be overjoyed to see native apps show new promise but they feel tired & their adherents to be displeasurable & backwards looking) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTaeVVAvk-c

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VyseofArcadia1y ago

These are all the views of someone who is hopelessly naive. Maybe some truth, but ignorant of where we came from and how we got here. This is a diseased view, is reprehensible, small minded, and aggressively mean, and it's absurd given how much complexity has been poured into making computers do simple things in the most complex way possible.

My man, I am not a fossil. I came of age with web apps. But I am someone who has seen both sides. I have worked professionally on both desktop applications and as a full stack web developer, and my informed takeaway is web apps are insane. Web dev is a nightmarish tower of complexity that is antithetical to good engineering practice, and you should only do it if you are working in a problem space that is well and truly web-native.

I try to live by KISS, and nontrivial web apps are not simple. A couple of things to consider:

1. If it is possible to do the same task with a local application, why should I instead do that task with a web app that does everything in a distributed fashion? Unnecessary distributed computing is insane.

2. If it is possible to do the same task with a local application, and as a single application, not client-server, why should I accept the overhead of running it in a browser? Browsers are massive, complex, and resource hungry. Sure, I'll just run my application inside another complex application inside a complex OS. What's another layer? But actually, raw JS, HTML, and CSS are too slow to work with, so I'll add another layer and do it with React. But actually, React is also too slow to work with, so I'll add another layer and do it with Next.js. That's right, we've got frameworks inside of frameworks now. So that's OS -> GUI library -> browser -> framework -> framework framework -> application.

3. The world desperately needs to reduce its energy consumption to reduce the impact of climate change. If we can make more applications local and turn off a few servers, we should.

I am not an old man yelling at the cloud. I am a software engineer who cares deeply about efficient, reliable software, and I am begging, pleading for people to step back for a second and consider whether a simpler mode of application development is sufficient for their needs.

jauntywundrkindOP1y ago

> Browsers are massive, complex, and resource hungry. Sure, I'll just run my application inside another complex application inside a complex OS. What's another layer? But actually, raw JS, HTML, and CSS are too slow to work with, so I'll add another layer and do it with React.

That's just your opinion, and you're overgeneralizing one framework as the only way.

A 2009 mobile phone did pretty damned awesome with the web. The web is quite fast if you use it well. Sites like GitHub and YouTube use web components & can be extremely fast & featureful.

Folks complain about layers of web tech but what's available out of box is incredible. And it's a strength not a weakness that there are many many ways to do webdev, that we have good options & keep refining or making new attempts. The web keeps enduring, having strong fundamentals that allow iteration & exploration. The Extensible Web Manifesto is alive and well, is the cornerstone supporting many different keystone styles of development. https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto

It's just your opinion again and again that the web so bad and ke, all without evidence. It's dirty shitty heresay.

Native OSes are massive, complex, and resource hungry and better replaced by the universal hypermedia. We should get rid of the extra layers of non-web that don't help, that are complex and bloated.

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