Comment by harwoodleon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by harwoodleon | Hacker News Reader

Whilst I am in favour of the optimisation of resources (and use these sources) we are willingly moving the "View Source" model to for profit entities like github.

In the way the internet has evolved we really should look hard it the elephant in the room: the DOM is for documents - not for interfaces.

IMHO optimisation for javascript is just a short term fad (hopefully) and browsers will adopt a more open approach to interface building. This should lead to "View source" on an open standard for interface building - which I think React comes close to. I know there are projects around that attempt this, but I am not aware of any real successes - at least in the same way React has grown.

The elegance of HTML has been superseded now, because interfaces are rich and packed with features. The DOM design is lacking and slow because of legacy support.

If the whole community effort was spent creating a better UI/UX standard (a standard web front end) - compilers would have no business case and i'm not sure they ever should.

> If the whole community effort was spent creating a better UI/UX standard (a standard web front end)

What do you mean by standard? HTML already has a UX/UI standard (technically standard and with some deviations in terms of design implementation depending on the browser). A <button /> is always a button and looks like a button in any browser.

The problem is that it looks awful if you are not Stallman. Both Android and iOS have been improving and refining (visually!) their UI elements, but this has not been done in the web, basically because there isn't a huge company calling the shots behind it.

If you want to improve that, we are heading in that direction with Web Components, but at the end of the day it's just an abstraction layer over the DOM elements. And I'm not sure I want Google leading the way (with Polymer).

EDIT: Some grammar.

HTML has a UX/UI standard for iterating documents. Applications however, are not explicitly catered for. HTML standards for web application development are a bit like putting F1 wheels on a bus.

For example : a dashboard is a common interface pattern, but this would (and should) probably never enter the Document Object space.

I think you're preoccupied by the word "document". There are many ways that applications are catered for. WebSockets are of no use to documents, only applications, as one example.

Websockets are of use to live documents.

Application stacks are different.

The definition is extremely important as the current level of interaction richness was never really envisaged in 1996.

A document is a resource that is available specifically over http or https. An application is something entirely different as it can be served via a huge array of protocols and terminated and rendered entirely differently.

The separation of concerns here is my need, not the terminology.

For example, how much time have programmers spent globally repeatedly creating and implementing a user login and password reset flow?

This is simply not the concern of the Document Object Model and it means that we have to put up with a huge array of home brewed solutions that each have their own weaknesses. Imagine the same effort and logic applied to routers or tcp/ip for that matter. The internet would simply not work or break.

My point is - there has been a land grab over the UI / UX space that has meant standards like web components are marginalised in favour of 'frameworks' and compilers.

Seems like an awful lot of duplicated effort to reach the same result.

> Both Android and iOS have been improving and refining (visually!) their UI elements, but this has not been done in the web, basically because there isn't a huge company calling the shots behind it.

I don't know about the other browsers, but Firefox defaults to displaying buttons the same way the OS does, so any visual refinement is adopted automatically. Of course the majority of websites override this to get full control over the look, which I find to be quite superfluous in most cases. The text field I'm typing this in and the "reply" button below it work perfectly fine without any fancy styling.

> Whilst I am in favour of the optimisation of resources (and use these sources) we are willingly moving the "View Source" model to for profit entities like github.

That ship sailed when we 1) made JS too capable (ability to initiate requests, ability to handle requests instead of the browser, access to too many user actions) and 2) didn't improve the standard input and UI elements enough (sortable, searchable table should be built-in, for example)

Honest question: apart from nerds, what reason do we have for valuing 'View Source'?

I mean, you can't 'View Source' anything of the computer the browser is running on, or the browser itself.

presumably, the parent commenter laments that you cannot easily decipher the code that drives today's webapps, where as yester-decade's webapp's view-source is simple to decipher (and presumably, learn/copy from).

Learning: I learned a big deal of web development (HTML, CSS and JS) from view-source. Tweaking: I sometimes fix broken closed-source/proprietary applications or websites by checking the source and writing a user script. Those two can probably fall into the "Nerd" category, though...

When I was a kid and started doing that, I thought that the compiled scripts were written like this, and I was fascinated (and terrified) by how complex they were.

I recall being both impressed by the complexity and either annoyed or impressed by how well formatted the raw HTML output was.

"How can they possibly stand to work on this when it's all jumbled together on one line??"

I would manually pretty-print so I could actually read what was going on, and now I still like to output tidier HTML when I can, even if no one is ever going to see it.

None apart from that.. but the freedom to easily tinker and understand whats going on has massive impacts on the industry in the long term.

Technology is becoming easier to use, but more sophisticated and more of a blackbox so much harder to understand or replicate. Higher barriers to entry in the market, more power to existing gatekeepers. Fewer and fewer people will understand enough to wield influence and those people will be employed by big companies for tons of money. It shifts the balance of power and only a select few people can expect to have a big impact.

Simple example - imagine Google was as easy to replicate as it was in the very beginning. If you disliked the direction ads & privacy are heading, maybe 4-5 people could make their own search engine just as good with more privacy rights and less creepy tracking. Now it will take 100 people and billions of dollars to even get close...

barriers to entry go up => resources required to compete with existing players go way up => existing players get more power => existing players abuse power. Ahh the business cycle.

The Web has more reach than any publishing medium in human history (number and variety of consumers, producers, devices, industries, languages, etc.) Many features combine to make it so, and "view source" is one of them.

How do non-nerds become nerds? "View source" can be the lid of the pandora's box for lots of young people who become inspired to be developers.

Alos the web is not just for nerds! HTML is a language that lots of everyday people can write now - it is empowering.

We were already nerds for a few decades before the browser was invented.

And we (my generation) weren't!

"View Source" is not the only way to start on your way to nerddom, but it is, or at least was at some point in time, an important one.

I find computer magazines and programming books more relevant, and those aren't going away.

An opposing data point: I can't recall the last time I used a physical programming book for anything other than a monitor riser (being so thick, they're fantastic for this). And I am from the generation where those books were how you learned to program.

Every resource I consume today is either in HTML or PDF form.

Maybe, but why not all of that? And some more?

Two other things that helped push me into the nerd side when I was a kid:

- QBasic shipping with the OS on my first computer

- Video games that shipped with map editors (Abuse, StarCraft, Unreal Tournament - the latter actually gave access to most of the source code through it)

I'm in favour of everything that exposes the inner workings of computers. Software, in particular, shouldn't be a black box, even if 99% of the time everyone (developers included) treat it as such.

What about the newer nerds who don't have grey beards?

Take a nerd class in high school. Go to nerd university.

Besides the educational value mentioned elsewhere, by browsing the web you're promiscuously executing code sent by random strangers, with whom you have no long-term relationship. It's important to be able to review what comes from them. View Source and dev panel are, and forever should be, an important part of the browser.

Most things suck. Interactive environments where the user can inspect the software they are running, and even change it on the fly, is what all computing environments ought to be like. We should be empowering computer users and making it easy to look under the hood.

> I mean, you can't 'View Source' anything of the computer the browser is running on, or the browser itself.

Says you:-)

When I'm running SLIME in emacs talking to SBCL, I can type M-. to look up definitions of SLIME elisp, Swank Lisp and so forth, all the way into emacs's C core and the SBCL internals (more Lisp code). This sort of capability has existed since the 80s at least, and maybe even further back.

Yes, yes, I know: I sound like a broken record, extolling the capabilities dynamic systems give one. But they're awesome, and they've been around forever, and they're well-tested, and they perform well enough. It really is a shame the tech world keeps on chasing the new & shiny (and half-baked) instead of improving the wonderful stuff we've had for decades.

> Whilst I am in favour of the optimisation of resources (and use these sources) we are willingly moving the "View Source" model to for profit entities like github.

It's not necessarily an either/or. We invented sourcemaps so that we can continue to debug the code we write. There is nothing stopping us from copying our sourcemaps and source files to Production for ourselves (let's face, we all sometimes try to debug Production) and even for those next generation programmers that get curious how we build what we build.

I think the DOM, and really the web as a whole, is a really incredible experiment in blurring the lines between documents and interfaces, which really are just two arbitrary delineations of "what a computer can do".

So for example, the DOM is what enabled newspapers to come online, and now it's what's turning newspapers into interactive online narrative machines. I'm typing into a hybrid document-application right now.

> optimisation for javascript is just a short term fad

WebAssembly should offer the best of both worlds...optimized for performance and with at least an answer to the view source complaint. And, perhaps the best benefit, the ability to write in a language other than JavaScript. These compilers have turned a (semi-)human-readable programming language into what is essentially a textual binary format. It makes sense to just embrace that reality with a fully-binary format.

"Whilst I am in favour of the optimisation of resources (and use these sources) we are willingly moving the "View Source" model to for profit entities like github."

I don't see this as a problem. They're providing a service, and doing it well. Why should they not be rewarded for that?

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