Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

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> Whether or not an application is delivered through a browser or natively is inconsequential to most of these users.

This is probably the most true statement in your entire comment.

Running with the assumption that of course we should ignore the users who aren't "most" users (not a safe one).... I'd go farther, though. Whether or not these users are getting access to the utility they're looking for through:

(1) a web page with some layer of interactivity on top of more-or-less legible document semantics or

(2) whether they get it through a giant-blob-of-code SPA

is also irrelevant, right? Except to some minority of power users who can actually get more utility when someone uses a more basic semantic-document resource-oriented approach.

So it isn't the users who are driving the "let's use the web as a VM for desktop apps!" trend. It's the developers. And it isn't the billions of Internet users whose habits would need to change.

I'd guess the most ready response to this would be something like "How would you have the current Facebook/YouTube/WebMail Experience without this Desktop-Experience-Focus?" But as far as I can tell, the essentially utility involved here -- and to a large extent, the best things about the experience -- haven't really changed since a FB page was actually a legible document (a milestone we left down the road a looooong time ago).

The document-centered approach does have its limits. There are some applications it will not support. First-person shooters.... sure, deploy a black-box binary to a runtime.

Facebook, YouTube, and web mail are not really in that category at this point, and developer choices are the primary thing driving the march away from documents here.

So it isn't the users who are driving the "let's use the web as a VM for desktop apps!" trend. It's the developers.

Really? I was in a public middle school this afternoon that, just a few years ago, was having to buy expensive computers and licenses for MS-Word. Only a few could be bought, and each was its own little separately licensed, separately maintained world that easily became unusable. If a server had problems, your work required access to a specific machine. Access required lots of waiting.

And now? Chromebooks for a tenth the price (don't have to support full, expensive Widows/OSX), which they bought in order to "use the Web as a VM for desktop apps" (the horror!) such as Google's free equivalents of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Now everyone gets access, and they can even continue working on their own documents after school from the public library, a home tablet, or any number of other options made possible by the Web (and ever-improving hardware options).

And do you imagine that our science teacher and her students are more interested in A) "pages" about physics with "more-or-less legible document semantics", or B) live physics simulations to experiment with on their Chromebooks and phones? Are uncaring developers the only ones driving these poor users to the latter?

The problem with this "apps are oppression, simple docs for the masses!" meme is that the narrative excludes a vast number of those "underserved" who want good apps more than simple docs and need the Web-as-VM to finally make it possible.

> was having to buy expensive computers and licenses for MS-Word

how did the developers force that one upon you ?

The developers (and commercial environment) hadn't come up with anything better yet, so the local OS with local MS Word application was the best choice.

Now things are different.

> The problem with this "apps are oppression, simple docs for the masses!"

I kindof knew someone was going to confuse my argument and think I was arguing against web applications. Or against the browser as a platform.

It's a sign of how deep a certain kind of thinking goes in the industry. If we're talking orienting around semantic documents and resources.... we can't be talking about real applications! There's just no way to create interactive applications around those!

(And conversely, unless we're talking about application frameworks, lots of code --preferably not written in JavaScript, of course, which everyone knows isn't a serious language compared to Python -- unless we're working with GUI toolkit metaphors, unless the finished product simply isn't meant to ever be read by a human, we can't be talking about an actual application, right?)

> And do you imagine that our science teacher and her students are more interested in A) "pages" about physics with "more-or-less legible document semantics", or B) live physics simulations to experiment with on their Chromebooks and phones? Are uncaring developers the only ones driving these poor users to the latter?

Like the astute reader would note I said in my earlier post, some applications really don't fit inside a document/resource-oriented paradigm. Some simulations for sure, including first-person shooters and other games.

Other simulations, of course, fit rather nicely as a document with a layer of interactivity, and in that case, yes, the problem would indeed be uncaring developers. Perhaps particularly those who think interactive and semantic are exclusive.

What a wonderful story. Do those children know that everything they do on their Chromebooks is tracked and analysed by Google? Probably not, and they don't even know what tracking is or why it's bad.

They've been sold the idea that web apps and the cloud are beautiful and "free".

Same thing happens if they use Windows (esp Win 10). Did you know that when you search Google or Yahoo (using IE), your query is sent to Microsoft and stored?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGze_gjJTos&t=9m50s

It's only a small minority of users who are affected, but historically how much innovation happened due to the web's openness and that small minority's tinkering.

The majority of web "innovation" already existed at Xerox PARC hypermedia applications.

The web is just a worse experience of what Xerox already had.

It may be worse, but it's a lot more democratic. Now we are moving away from that two way street into something much more monopolistic.

Democracy for content, tyranny for developers (one legacy language or transpilation).

Webassembly will likely open even more doors because it'll free us from the shackles of the web's document publishing origin.

And I for one, can't wait to piss on Javascript's grave.

Bill Gates' quote fits perfectly: "Develop for it? I’ll piss on it."

http://www.quoteswise.com/bill-gates-quotes-5.html

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