> Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with a handful of span tags. We went from abusing tables to abusing the entire document.

True but there is some reaction to this. On one hand there are people like yourself that just make the document from data and javascript using lots of build tools, frameworks and ever more specialist technologies.

On the other hand there are people wanting to get back to a pure document that has next to no javascript needed, using HTML5 built-ins for forms, CSS Grid for layout, no polyfills for legacy browsers and no frameworks. This is not widely given exciting buzzwords but 'intrinsic web design' is happening.

When I watch conference presentations it seems to me that there are two groups of people, those to whom the ever more complicated appeals and those to whom the make it simple appeals.

The 'make it simple' currently does not fit with existing workflows, maybe for startups but not for most web agencies where a good decade has now been spent nesting divs in more divs and making it a big mess of un-maintainable 'write only' code, with 97% unused stylesheets that have got to the stage where nobody knows what anything does, they just add new hacks to it.

With where we are with HTML5 it should be easy to markup your document semantically, however, Google have kind of given up with that and if you want to put some semantic goodness in there then you add some JSON-LD on the end rather than put property tags in everything throughout the document. It is as if Google would prefer the document to be doubled up, once with trillions of divs for some bad CSS and then done again to be machine readable.

Regarding mobile, 'progressive web apps' is widely supported and has removed the need for custom mobile applications. This is progress.

I'm working on a project with a React frontend. I think I never tried it on my phone. It probably works but the site is really meant for the desktop and I don't know if it makes sense on a small display.

However... I'm writing this on my phone so HN is part of the mobile web and it works well. I read the post on twobithistory.org on my phone and that also works well. I doubt that they have an app and even if they did, why should I install it and what would happen when I follow a link from HN to them? I'll get the mobile site or would the app catch the link and open itself?

I don't even have the apps of the news sites I read most. Reading them on the phone with Firefox and uBlock is good enough. Their apps probably contain more spyware then the adblocked sites.

So the mobile web did not conpletely fail. It's still what's on the screen of my phone for about 50% of the time: since last charge 3h 55m of screen time, 57m used by phone calls, 1h 54m Firefox, 15m WhatsApp, etc.

> 57m used by phone calls

You are an unusual smartphone user. For most people, it is 0m.

Do you have stats? You might be projecting.

I checked in the Battery settings. Android 8 shows the stats there.

In USA, the average time spent on voice calls is something like 20 minutes per day. 60 minutes is unusual, but not that unusual.

https://abcnews.go.com/WN/cell-phones-demography-nielsen-dat...

https://hackernoon.com/how-much-time-do-people-spend-on-thei...

I've been recently wondering if there's another, better way. The big usability win of the web is that you can run applications without installing anything. Is there a way we could build a new platform that would get us the advantages of the web without all the awful cruft?

I'm imagining starting with webassembly for sandboxing. We can then expose through to webassembly a useful set of API primitives from the underlying OS for text boxes, widgets and stuff.

Apps would live in a heavily sandboxed container and because of that they could be launched by going to the right URL in a special browser. We could use the same security model as phone apps - apps have a special place to store their own files. They have some network access, and can access the user's data through explicit per-capability security requests.

That would allow a good, secure webapp style experience for users. But the apps themselves would feel native (since they could use native UX primitives, and they would have native performance).

Developers could write code in any language that can compile to webassembly. We could make a bundler that produced normal applications (by compiling the app out of the sandbox). Or we could run the application in a normal web browser if we wanted, by backing the UX primitives with DOM calls, passed through to WASM.

The original usability win of the web was that anyone could put up some text with pictures and links and anyone else could see it. It was proto-Facebook. I think of the evolution of the web as a sequence of technologically trivial but socially innovative changes in format: from static pages to timestamped blog posts, aggregating multiple blogs in a feed, allowing comments and so on. That's the vision laid out in Clay Shirky's writings about social software, as true today as ever before. And unlike the "semantic web", that vision naturally leads to a wealth of semantic information (like friend graphs) which is tremendously useful.

Hopefully that explains why "API primitives exposed to webassembly" feels to me like thinking about the web from the wrong end. The social end is what makes the web tick. It could be built with tinkertoys for all I care.

Didn't we try this in the 90's with Java applets?

What is the essential difference between the success of browsers and the failure of X-Windows and Java applets?

For my money its that Java applets and X-Windows didn't have a distribution mechanism and security model. They simply didn't do anything I couldn't already do with desktop apps and HTML.

Also, frankly, they were kind of slow and not very good. I think thats the biggest problem with this sort of idea - the breadth of surface area for GUI toolkits is crazy huge. Building something that works well, and works cross-platform is a seriously huge amount of work.

Discovery. This is the essential difference. And this is mostly based on semantic features of html.

www has 3 main ways of discovery that alternative technologies didn’t offer: 1) search (leading you to correct info in the site, instead of just to a landing page. 2) overview pages, short summary with links to the actual info (google news, etc), 3) deep hyperlinks that everyone can easily discover (browser url) and provide elsewhere (email, Facebook posts, twitter posts, etc).

The first one is very much based on the semantic qualities of html, where google can crawl a page and make some educated guess about what the page is about.

Biggest problem with mobile apps is that discovery is completely channeled through commercial app stores.

I would like to see an alternative web tech stack that doesn’t skip the discovery part. Web assembly with canvas for example is completely useless for a search crawler.

> What is the essential difference between the success of browsers and the failure of X-Windows and Java applets?

Timeline is one of the key ones. According to chrome task manager (because browsers need task managers now) the page I'm typing this reply on the contains a text area and your comment is consuming 30MB of RAM. Back when Java applets were getting their reputation for being slow I would have been lucky to have a computer with 32MB of RAM, 8 and 16MB were still common at that time. Now there were some other things that made applets awful, but if they were introduced today they wouldn't seem nearly as bad as we remember, on the same computer this page would be clunky.

For x-windows, it was never really a contender because there was no MS compatibility, but the potential was there.

Java actually has a pretty decent security model. Like most sandboxes it was (and still is) full of holes, but browsers don't fare much better.

How are you crossing the bridge from webassembly to having access to the native UX primitives? Are you directly making C calls to native libraries like win32?

You can do that with PWAs if they are packaged as native apps.

For example on Windows, Microsoft has rebooted hosted UWP JavaScript apps into signed PWAs.

So on that case, you can check if UWP APIs are available and use all of them, depending on UWP permissions for the app.

Chrome is following a similar route with ChromeOS and Chrome Android.

As native/Web developer I tend to have a native bias, but PWAs look like the way the Web might win back native. It isn't fully there though.

Through a privileged security barrier, which in practice would look like a separate API. That API would in turn make win32 (or UWP or whatever) calls.

At a minimum we'd need a separate API to enforce a web / mobile style security boundary.

XWindows?

When people say this, it feels like we're in different universes, or at least looking for different things.

I main Linux on all of my machines. Most of the native apps on it have terrible UX. Even big apps - On touch screens, Firefox doesn't support two-fingered scroll. Chrome won't snap to the side of a desktop. Neither will bring up a virtual keyboard if I click on the URL bar.

The majority of my native apps that I use don't support fractional scaling - apps like Unity3d are unusable on 13 inch screens and there's no way for me to zoom in or out on them. Even system dialogs suffer from this problem sometimes, it's like nobody on native ever learned what an 'em' unit is and they're still stuck in 1990 calculating pixel positions.

To contrast, most of the websites that I'm using, even when they're badly designed will work on smallish screens or can be individually zoomed in and out. My keyboard shortcuts work pretty much the same across every site (aside from the rare exception that tries to be all fancy and implement its own). If they break, it's not rare for me to be able to open up an inspector and add one or two CSS rules that fix the problem.

Reading Hacker News, I sometimes wonder if I'm just browsing/using entirely different sites/apps than everybody else is. I don't understand how my experience is so different.

Regarding semantic HTML, I generally don't have too much of a problem there either. I don't think semantic HTML is hard to write - I use it on every single one of my sites. If you're using React and it can't be used without spitting divs all over the place, maybe the solution is just to stop using React? Modern HTML is only going to look like div soup if you fill it with divs.

I mean, I can build you a horrible SQL database that requires 30 joins on every data call, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SQL is bad. It means that auto-generating SQL tables based on a bunch of cobbled-together frameworks and user-scripts is bad. Treat your application's DOM like you would a schema, and put some thought into it. That will also solve a great deal of the responsive design problems on mobile that people are talking about, because light DOM structures are more flexible than heavy ones.

> I don't think semantic HTML is hard to write - I use it on every single one of my sites.

Buzzword-compliant semantic HTML or semantically useful HTML? Is there any user-agent out there that benefits from the extra work you're putting in?

It's important to distinguish between the semantic web and semantic HTML. They are different things.

The criticisms this article levies about the semantic web are pretty much straight on as far as I can tell.

Semantic HTML is pretty straightforward though - it's using HTML to describe content, rather than purely for layout. Some sites do it better than others, but it's certainly not dead or abnormal -- and many static HTML generators are... decent.. ish. Semantic HTML is using stuff like article tags and sections, using actual links instead of just putting a click handler on a div, stuff like that. The stuff that makes it easy to parse and understand a web page.

It's very useful - semantic HTML is the reason that sites like Pocket work, it's the reason why reader mode in Firefox/Safari works. It's the reason why screenreaders on the web work so much better than on native apps (at least as far as my experience on Linux has gone, maybe other people have better apps than me :)) It also (opinion me) makes styling easier, because light descriptive DOM structures tend to be easier to manipulate in CSS than large ones.

The semantic web, to the extent that it's well-defined at all is more about the metadata associated with a webpage. Very different concepts.

There used to be a plugin for Firefox that would indicate if a page contained any FOAF info.

Same can be told about native apps that don't bother with layout managers, specially if they are part of the OS frameworks to start with.

It's a double-edged sword. I get why some apps say, "I want to handle everything myself", because then you don't have to debug which versions of a framework you're compatible with, and you don't have deal with these massive layers of abstractions. I hate working with frameworks, if I was building a Linux app I would be very tempted to just directly call into X or Wayland.

On the other hand, the last time I launched Braid on Linux, I had to manually change my resolution back afterwards and it removed my desktop background.

And I just felt like, "I'm sure there was a really good, sensible reason for whatever hack this game relied on when it originally launched on Linux. But... come on, if you had used some common framework, for all of the terrible problems that might have brought, when I launched it years later it would have at least full-screened properly."

So I dunno. The number of really big Linux apps that end up using their own custom display code is surprising to me. Even Emacs isn't fully using GTK. I assume developers of those apps are smart, so I assume there must be a good reason for it.

Nobody is stopping people from using the relatively new article or header tags. There is not really an inherent advantage in using divs except that they are barebones maybe. Apart from that, there are data attributes which are actually used on real-world websites for annotation of texts. Indeed they go particularly well with span tags.

People forget that all these fancy frameworks produce actual HTML5 DOMs, who cares if those are static or dynamic. I someone wants to write a semantic web parser/crawler then it's a great idea, but probably it shouldn't be done using wget. :-)

> Modern HTML is really nothing more than div tags everywhere, with a handful of span tags.

So just add a layout-language to divide it from the content, as already done with style?