We packed for the hike tomorrow and now we should go to bed, I guess.
@brennen was replying to @jonny regarding the problem with Javascript, and one point I wanted to add is that JavaScript is fine when writing webapps and the problem is only when everything is an app.
Documents have many positive aspects and forcing people to use an app (anything with Javascript) means that almost always the experience degrades: less accessibility, less freedom in layout, theming, archiving, printing, navigation, and so on.
The two problems are thus: apps instead of documents, and badly designed apps.
In the case of things that are in fact apps that run on the virtual machine that is the browser, I have nothing against Javascript and use it myself (Gridmapper).
The fact that the virtual machine is super hard to implement and wouldn’t be necessary for simple hypertext online adds insult to injury.
#Web
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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IMHO Javascript is a difficult language (almost wrote “bad”), because it has so many “problematic” things that it requires a lot of self-control to use only the stuff that is definitely good.
If you combine that with that brilliant quote by Jeff Atwood:
Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript
Then that’s where we are now. There are exceptions though. I still don’t understand how the best PDF viewer I have is PDF.js running on Firefox...
– jjm 2022-07-21 07:41 UTC
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I must confess that most of the things that annoy me about JavaScript are browser things: when we can access local files, remote sited, how keyboard events are handled: specially since they are also used to control the browser itself, and so on.
– Alex 2022-07-21 20:35 UTC
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On Mastodon, I had a follow-up for @jonny:
I think the main problem with our system is that we abandoned documents and turned them into apps in order to add dynamic table of contents, navigational aid, and so on, offloading the work to the author of the document-app, instead of asking the browser developers for better support. All the ideas that were lost. Remember the meta tags for up, next, prev navigation, the nav element, and so on. In theory, all of this can be used. In practice, perhaps lynx and w3m used them, I’m not even sure. Remember Amaya had support for POST to edit documents. All of these advances were ditched because it was “easier” for document-app developers to add it themselves (all things reinvented a gazillion times, never to be reused by anonymous users), and browser developers and Javascript framework developers focused on different things. (Namely, how to improve Amazon, Gmail and Facebook, most likely…)
– Alex 2022-07-22 18:56 UTC