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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

If the rest of the web was like this, my web browser wouldn't need 600M of RAM or weekly security updates.

And you would never use it for anything besides reading documents.

Uh huh, and that's bad how?

It's not bad. But I wouldn't want to give up the applications that have made my life far more efficient due to their being hosted and universally available in a web-browser. Obviously Gmail is the big one here.

Or buying things online, or posting to Twitter, etc. AJAX is nice for building applications, but very few applications need total interactivity. I can't think of any AJAX-y web application I actually use, other than ones I've written.

All of my web browsing is fine with the latency of a page load.

What about voting on HN? Would be pretty annoying to reload the page after every vote no?

Just middle-click to open the "your vote was counted" in a new tab.

But anyway, having Javascript in your browser is not what makes it bloated; Emacs had an embeddable programming language many years before anyone even thought to embed Javascript in a web browser. It is quirks mode + the DOM + bad programming. (Bad programming == using raw C++. A few years ago, Firefox used a lot of memory because of heap fragmenentation. Garbage collection or double-indirection pointers would easily have solved that problem.)

"Thanks to the joint efforts of OpenOffice, Mozilla, and a few others, Emacs officially entered the category of lightweight utilities." -- http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8224&cid=709073

Hilarious.

C programs are bloated when you consider the C library and UNIX environment they require.

OK fair enough. But bad programming by browser makers has nothing to do with the markup used for web-pages, which is what you were praising with BH's homepage. Quirks mode also has nothing to do with markup and everything to do with browser makers' failure to implement w3c css standards. And wasn't the DOM developed to accommodate demands for client side scripting such as javascript.

So two of the things you cite as contributing to bloat have nothing to do with page design, and without the third (the DOM) we'd give up a lot of client-side scripting functionality, which is exactly the functionality I am arguing isn't worth giving up.

meh? click on up/down vote button -> GET/POST -> displays a comments page with recounted votes at the location of your comment

you still need to reload to see other people's votes even with today's fancy ajax voting!

"Fancy" is not the word to describe HN's AJAX voting. "Minimally functional" is closer.

If other comments had been posted, you would lose your place. Also, the screen flash would interrupt reading.

Not to mention, some people don't have superfast broadband.

You say that like you think it's a bad thing.

Yeah, there was no eBay, no Amazon, no Excite, no Hotmail, no Viaweb etc. before Web 2.0 came.

I work for one of the above - you have no idea how much functionality we wouldn't be able to have (or at least wouldn't be reasonably easy to use) without "Web 2.0".

I work in subsidiary of one of the above too. I do have some idea what kind of functionality you couldn't have, the question is how much money would your company not get if this functionality was missing ;)

I guess it depends on how you interpret "like this" in the original post. The things you cite above are nothing at all like the BH homepage.

Check out the original versions of those sites. They look exactly like the current BH page.

I wasn't suggesting they don't look similar. You'll notice I didn't say that. I think it's obvious that those sites offered a level of interactivity that the current BH page does not though, so I feel like you're being a little disingenuous here.

I guess I'm not clear on what you meant in your original post then. Did you mean that If the web consisted of the pages that were around in 1997 we wouldn't have weekly security updates and 600K memory-hog browsers? Or did you mean that if people designed web-pages to be informational and not interactive we wouldn't have those problems? I interpreted your comment as the latter, but I would take issue with both.

In the end my problem with your comment is that it's a lot like saying "If we didn't have email, we wouldn't have spam" or "If cars didn't have windows, it would be harder to break into them." It just seems like silly nostalgia. I suppose I should have articulated this more clearly from the beginning.

Well, 640K ought to be enough for anybody really.

... except bill never said that. this is a false meme that really, really needs to die.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."

"... except bill said that. this is a false meme that really, really needs to die."

Yes, I know it's a misquote.

He didn't say Bill. Or it might've been someone with the same name as The Bill Gates.

And 640K is enough for everyone, at least it was enough 30 years ago :)

the 640k barrier was a major pain in my butt for almost a decade. first we had expanded memory, then extended memory, both of which could only be used by some programs. then there were add-ons like qemm, which could remap physical ram into unused areas of the 384k add-on space. for a long time there, computers that had more unused rom space than others were more valuable to people like me who ran a bunch of memory-hungry apps. what a nightmare!

i should have gotten on the unix bandwagon from the beginning. at the time i just didn't know any better.

I didn't even think of the meme.

Personally, I thought of Norm. You don't know Norm, but he's the guy who sold my family our first 386 with a 40MB hard drive and said it was more than we'd ever use. He also sold me a copy of Sim Earth and said it was the best game ever made. The bastard.

Of course, if someone who would look foolish if he had made a certain statement would vehemently deny making it (or just forget it). Bill's refutation is not proof that he never made the comment.

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