With the hyper-AJAXed world, client-side innovation becomes impossible.
What?
What?
At the time, we were talking about developing all sorts of agents. Things that would shop for you. Things that would find parts for you. Thinks that would remember what web sites you visited, and let you search them. Things that would track where in a long set of pages you were (blog, comic, etc.), and let you keep reading from there. It happened for a while, and then it died when the web became too damn hard. Writing anything that can reasonably see and parse web pages now takes many, many web years. There are only four or five organizations with that kind of resources (WebKit, Mozilla, Opera, IE, and internally, Google). There are countless things we just didn't even imagine.
It's like the DMCA. You notice all the innovations that happen, but you miss all the innovations it made impossible.
You won't need to write a complete JavaScript library. Look at all the testing suites that automate browser instances, Selenium being the most well-known.
That's not what the web is and that is not the web environment that I want.
No, 15 years ago you could reasonably write a search engine for 15 years ago. It would suck by today's standards.
You want to handle Javascript? Easy! There are plenty of tools to choose from now. Run a browser as your crawler, visit the sites, and read the generated source instead of the static source. Shove that into your 15-years-ago search engine, and there's no difference.
>Things that would track where in a long set of pages you were
You mean bookmarks? Add a scroll %, assuming they're not nice enough to use anchor tags / IDs meaningfully, and you're golden.
>Writing anything that can reasonably see and parse web pages...
has become a community effort, instead of a bunch of isolated silos where people reinvented the wheel out of necessity.
The resources required aren't so large just because it's so much more complex, it's large because it's so much faster, and you won't survive if you can't compete. How long did we languish with crappy Javascript engines? How much would you need to know to actively compete in that section alone now? It's easy to make a slow-but-functional browser, and if you looked around you'd see some people doing just that. Making a fast-and-resilient one is as hard as making a fast-and-resilient anything, especially where human input (ie, HTML) is expected to be consumed.
Bookmarks in books work okay. You move them. Book marks in browsers don't. You have to remove the old one, add the new one, and the overall process is too cumbersome to be useful for the application I mentioned.
As to the auto-updating bookmarks, would it resolve the issue if I made an extension to do that for you? I can see the use, honestly, and I like it. (seriously, I'm offering, and I'd probably use it myself. It'd be an interesting project. Even if it doesn't resolve the issue - we might just fundamentally disagree here, I'm OK with that.)
But why should that be part of the browser, when modern browsers allow you to do damn near anything by simply leveraging it? Why should we rely on browser makers to tell us what's possible, when we can do it ourselves, because of the changes in the past 15 years?
As to what should and shouldn't be part of the browser -- the way to figure that out is experimentation and competition. When you make technologies and standards simple and easy, people will make independent implementations and try things. The vast majority will be dumb, but some (often unanticipated ones) will turn out to be useful, clever, or brilliant. That's how the technology improves.
When you make standards big and cumbersome, progress stops.
If you want to read through a site's archives, what I do is keep it open in a tab. It is restored when I reopen my browser, saved if I reboot, etc. It's not as handy as a bookmark, but it comes close.
I think you (and most people here) underestimate what the "old web" could imagine, though. We had all sort of ideas for agents that would go out and grab and analyze data for us in all sorts of clever and interesting ways. Search engines got built, as did one or two other things, and then the web just got too complex.
Hell, even I had a simple app that went out and grabbed all my favorite comics and showed them to me, nicely formatted, and without ads.
While the web gets more complex, the tools at hand get better. Much better.
What about JS frameworks like JavascriptMVC or Sammy [1]? Google even created a spec [2] for crawling such sites.
[1] http://sammyjs.org/ [2] http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started...
The drive toward semantic markup in HTML5 is supposed to help the web get back to those original ideals. Over time, we'll increasingly expect web developers to conform to a subset of possible HTML arrangements, much like book publishers conform to a subset of the possible random arrangements and orientations of letters on a page (odd poetry excepted).
Have you taken a look recently at the plethora of web APIs for just about every purpose? The modern way of collecting machine-friendly data from a server is through APIs and semantic content (RDFa, microformats, etc.).
Not through HTML / CSS / Javascript formatted pages which are made primarily for human consumption.
Again, read the literature on agents from the nineties, and see how diverse a technology tree was killed....
But today JS frameworks like jQuery give us the means to do anything we want javascript-related, in any browser that half-supports javascript. By deprecating IE7 they're just saying they're going to drop all of the extra hacks they had to use to keep IE7 working.
A lot of what newer browsers give us is just better rendering. You can replace a mess of tables and nested divs with things like border-radius, which means less client-side html to wade through.
Try looking at Freebase or DBpedia and tell me where did you have such a huge amount of easily parsable, semantic content in the 90s.
Service architecture have also been moving from stuff like SOAP to REST, which is definitively more open and accessible.
And even Ajax-ladden webpages are still just a Firebug Network tab away since they all run over HTTP, and then you have a nicely structured data format instead of having to deal with messy HTML pages.