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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

As much as we all use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; it isn’t 2003 anymore. Most web browsers people use are relatively up to date and automatically updating.

This also means… we aren’t necessarily stuck forever with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We could make a new scripting language. We could make a new markup language - or, better, explore different paradigms that might be more suitable. Maybe there’s a better way than having a DOM in the first place. We’ll never have that discussion though if people are forever convinced of JavaScript being the pinnacle.

I say this as a person who is more willing to question whether ridiculous levels of abstractions means the underlying technology perhaps needs changes.

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Nobody said "Javascript is the pinacle". But it is extremely difficult to create standards that multiple companies can agree on and want to spend huge efforts to implement and continue to refine for 30+ years. Microsoft tried to make VBScript happen, but nobody else making browsers would ever support it, so it died. And I'm glad it did, because it let everyone focus on Javascript and improving it, hardening it as an attack vector, and creating a huge variety of tooling for every kind of project.

Web browsers that don't use HTML, JS, and CSS simply wouldn't be web browsers, that would be something else entirely. And anyone is free to try to make that application using any tech they want, but it won't be widely adopted or supported the way HTML, JS and CSS are.

After working with new age frameworks (SwiftUI, Compose, Flutter), I’m rediscovering web development (last time I’ve touched it was more than 10 years ago).

I can’t believe how far modern web jumped. Development process, modern ES features, reliable CSS, amount of learning resources.

I will never understand why would you sacrifice all of this for something like Compose/Flutter, with their janky web performance, clunky, baroque toolchains and nonexistent (compared to pool of JS developers) mindshare.

To start with Compose you need to:

Install Java

Install Intellij

Somehow generate working project

Wrestle for half a day with Gradle

Search for ever changing APIs or updates

Find a way to reference html and CSS

Somehow connect all of this together and finally launch in the browser

After that - good luck debugging black box generated by Kotlin compiler

And now compare this to JS/CSS/HTML:

Most likely you already have modern enough browser

Create file wherever

python3 -m http.server

Done.

> Maybe there’s a better way than having a DOM in the first place.

I was just creating a UI with IMGUI library and found it immediately more pleasant to work with. No DOM, no CSS, no HTML. Just C code with a small number of low level abstractions provided by the library.

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