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Comment by trav4225 | Hacker News Reader

Yup! In my personal (and basically worthless) opinion, this is why the entire "web application" ecosystem is a giant, flawed mess. It's basically what happens when a system originally designed to represent and transfer rich textual documents (HTML/HTTP) is bastardized into a application architecture.

Yes, I'm being somewhat hyperbolic. Bring on the downvotes! ;-)

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This kind of criticism misses the point. The web is not designed. It is evolved. Various bits of it were designed at their outset, but it was literally impossible to envision all the implications of those design decisions.

This is not a bad thing, for the simple reason that every long-lived complex system involving many humans must behave this way.

Any attempt to top-down design the perfect, universal, distributed application runtime hits fundamental social problems not unlike those in a centrally planned economy: too much information to integrate, too many stubbornly uncooperative humans with their own divergent goals and opinions.

Systems at this scale are much more like biology than like circuit design.

Also JavaScript itself was designed to evolve in a backwards-compatible way. The way developers use JavaScript today is quite different from how they used it 10 years ago.

The idea that systems are fixed entities that have to be designed correctly up-front is wrong and is one of the reasons why the Waterfall model of software development has been superseded by Agile.

Good systems have to be designed to handle change. Change is the only constant thing in this world.

Evolution at-least has mass extinction events. Lets hope that Web 2.0, which resembles a gigantic, evolved Kraken filled with various protuberances analogous to the large intestine appendix, suffers from one sometime in the future.

It's a moot point. Very few professional web application developers would disagree with you. The problem is this is the world we live in and if you don't develop web applications in the consumer space you'll get eaten alive by your competitors who will.

It's worse than that. Because better solutions were "hard" or long-term and competing organizations couldn't agree on shared standards, they took an application and protocol designed to traverse documents, and built on complex hacks until it essentially became a pseudo-operating system, which now not only drives part of the global economy, but also changed the type and quality of information that most people receive.

So you're basically saying that the current web is a reflection of human kind, with all its flaws and quirks? :)

I like to think web browsers take the worse is better approach to security.

Security takes a back seat to reproductive fitness of the web as a platform. JS made the web insecure, but it also made it the world's premier application platform.

I blogged about this: http://kylebebak.github.io/post/browser-security-worse-is-be...

This problem isn't limited to web applications. Think about how many security problems happen on the server.

All sufficiently complex ecosystems are a giant, flawed mess.

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