> technologically retarded hellscape
The modern web seems pretty great to me. Why do you feel that way?
The modern web seems pretty great to me. Why do you feel that way?
* Accessibility - I can't change presentation to make things easier for me to consume
* Inspectability - I can't search, index, etc. Information is hidden behind js driven interfaces that only present bits at a time.
* Uniformity - I don't want to deal with a deluge of clever interfaces. I want the data only, and I want control over how I will present the data to myself.
* Buggy - All these custom JS driven interfaces means a never ending deluge of weird interaction bugs, most of which we just ignore. Pages are needlessly slow or error prone.
Google reader was nice, a day Google kill it, GitHub seems to be nice for some cohort of users, a day a political move between some countries makes your account locked, a day your ebook reader+service cease to exists with all books you never own but being convinced of the contrary, a day your smart vacuum cleaner stop to work because an AWS service have issues etc.
That's how pretty it is. Pretty to capture you, ugly once you discover you are trapped and than it's too late.
Oh, sure in mere tech terms you might run webapps locally, they are still NOT AT ALL pretty behind sugar-eye graphics, since integrate things, bend things is a nightmare that demand a gazillion SLoC for anything, while on classic CLI or better systems like Emacs you can do it in a snap. Not only: anything you'll learn on classic systems is valuable normally for a lifetime and more, anything you learn for the modern web might be valid for few years but generally last far less and no, you can't advance, you can only remain afloat keep learning the new crap on and on.
My point is:
- modern TUIs, called by most CLIs, compared to modern GUIs (widget based GUIs and WebUIs) are more powerful because AT LEAST they allow limited easy user extensibility and composability (scripts and unix IPCs);
- classic GUIs, in the sense of document UIs, like Emacs, like old Xerox Tioga etc, on contrary can be called 2D CLIs in modern lingo and they are FAR superior both of TUIs and modern GUIs because they are "graphical" and they are even more extensible and composable than TUIs.
That's is. Modern developers regularly push toward classic GUIs without knowing them, think for instance how popular Notebook UIs have became. WebUI themselves as a "more like documents" widgets-based GUIs. Still are are far behind classic document UIs.
A quote I once heard about the modern web browser: "I want this program to do everything my computer already does."
Imagine a simple hypertext markup language which tells a program how to render the text, link to different text or sites and perhaps paint some images on a screen. Seems pretty strait forward. Now make that program into a worse computer. This is what makes many people nauseous when they attempt to build "modern web" things.
I heard a great comparison of game dev to web dev: "You write programs to reach goals or a finish line. game dev feels like you're building and fine tuning a race car. Web dev feels like you're running a marathon in the rain and everyone is throwing garbage at you while booing."