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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

The web is a collection of terrible, short-sighted engineering mistakes that all compound each other unnecessarily. HTTP, HTML, CSS, and Javascript could probably all be scrapped and replaced with better standards. The only problem is that Google is probably the only organization capable of pulling that off, but Google's interests do not really overlap with the interests of most web users.

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I think you substantially underestimate how difficult it would be to come up with something “better” that can do everything HTTP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript can do. You are talking about the most successful global information system in existence. Outcompeting all other proposals/competitors. Good luck with that one.

The problem is how many of the things the web does that I don't want it to, like spying on me and consuming ludicrous amounts of compute resources. And the fact that it's controlled by people whose desires and interests are contrary to that of the user.

I'm not sure the first part is contrarian, since everybody loves to complain about web standards. It also seem a widespread fallacy among developers that you can fix all problems in an technology stack by scrapping everything and starting from scratch.

I think that is because we refer to everything using mixed metaphors. We "surf" "pages" on the "web" over the "information superhighway."

If we had a uniform view of what it is, we might be able to make something of it.

It's not that contrarian. I think many modern web frameworks try to do this gradually. I wouldn't be surprised if Google attempted it and failed.

I agree.

As someone whose day job doesn’t involve writing UI code, web UI still ends up being the easier of the two to implement.

As I see it, Google is doing exactly that with Flutter. It's a completely new layout and styling system for different devices, platforms and screen sizes.

I will look into that!

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