I poked at a tweet from Ken Kocienda over the weekend:
I don’t know Ken, so I feel a little bad for being harsh. But I haven’t changed how I feel. Saying “Web browsers are for viewing documents” is silly to me at this point, and suggesting it’s “the biggest wrong turn in the history of computing” feels like “your career in web development is invalid” and when people dig at what I do, I notoriously don’t take it well.
The point is silly anyway. Ken posted this on Twitter-dot-com, and then followed up with a link to job postings. I hope we all can see that Ken was literally leveraging the not-just-a-document-viewer nature of the web to help spread his message and help himself. It feels like saying “cars are bad” and then getting in your car to go to the grocery store.
Ship: sailed. The web is incredibly feature-rich far beyond viewing documents. I know the argument is that this was a mistake, not that web browsers aren’t currently capable of more. If that’s true though, what would you have the web do? Start stripping away features? Should we strip browsers down to document viewers? Maybe we just hand the keys to Facebook and we’ll just do whatever they say we should (lolz).
A super-capable open web is excellent. It means we can build things on open standards on the open web rather than things on proprietary technologies in walled gardens. It’s the better place to build things. URLs alone are a reason to build on the web.
There is still nuance to getting it right though. I enjoyed Noam Rosenthal’s baby bear porridge “Should The Web Expose Hardware Capabilities?”, which begins by discussing Alex Russell’s “Platform Adjacency Theory”:
I relate with the author’s passion for keeping the open web relevant, and with the concern that going too slow with enhancing the web with new features will make it irrelevant. This is augmented by my dislike of app stores and other walled gardens. But as a user I can relate to the opposite perspective — I get dizzy sometimes when I don’t know what websites I’m browsing are capable or not capable of doing, and I find platform restrictions and auditing to be comforting.
Maybe we just take it slow and do things carefully. Good slow. Slow, like brisket.
We’re doing that now, if by accident. Google forges ahead extremely quickly. Apple says hold on there, there are security issues here. And a smidge of vice-versa. I’d point out the other forces at work, but I guess we’re kinda down to two major browser vendor players. Not to discount Mozilla, but the choices they make with the web platform don’t affect the momentum of the web all that much at the moment.
What’s open about this web then?
Yes they are nice, but they are also being redefined by WHATWG, basically the same actors as above.
I think the problem being criticised here is that the complexity (i.e. entry barrier for creating a new web browser) is dictated by the major players as outlined in the first quote. We have standardisation organisations, but they are not self sustaining of course, and they are often just the same actors under a different name.
Not to mention the new URL specification has a nice box where there are “special” and “non-special” URLs. Have fun trying to develop something new (like the Gemini protocol), but it’s “non-special”, you know.
I think it’s fair to criticize when companies have too much control, but there is lots of stuff open about the web. There is an open standards process. The code that powers all the browsers is open source. The internet is an open place (and we need to fight to protect it).
Right this moment, you can go buy a domain name and set up a web server at one of literally thousands of hosts from which to publish a web page that browsers from several vendors can load.
All of this, without a single approval from Apple or Google. And if Apple or Google decide they don’t like your page, they’ll need to go through the legal system to shut it down.
Yes, working under the hood on the web should be more open and that’s a problem. I wish there were more browsers from more vendors – also a problem. But don’t discount the openness of participating within the web.
I believe the original intent of Tim Berners-Lee was for all web pages to be editable from within the browser. So even from the beginning, the intent went beyond the browser being merely a viewer.
I agree with that person Ken. Of course I use modern web, but I really really hate JavaScript and how it is used.
Did you tried to turn off JS once? You might presume that most web sites is unusable and broken without JS — no interactive elements, everything frozen, like that? The truth is that almost no sites will show anything except empty white page.
Did you noticed that pure CSS tricks is usually something great, running smoothly and CSS+JS effects is somehow worse, able to be laggy on old hardware?
I think using JS just to display static text page is fundamentally wrong and that’s why we are talking about it.
I don’t know. It’s kind of in the name. Hypertext transport protocol.
I’m a web dev for 20 years now. I love what I do and what the web has become. Http and browsers were clearly NOT meant to do what they do now. It’s a valid point to say turning http into an app communication protocol was a wrong turn, and browsers are a mess because of their transition from document viewers.
Hmm..not to sound cliche but “unintended” has proven to be a crutch of innovation. Imagine the leap– JS can multi-thread.. CSS can calculate.. etc..
The demand is there. The platform is there. Taking a step back just seems blindly dogmatic and pretty wasteful.
That’s ignoring 30 years of progress and features though. It’s like saying “the wheel wasnt originally meant to be used in roller coasters, so that’s not a good use of them”. Developers pushed what the web could do, browser makers pushed what the web could do, and here we are, well beyond what was possible when HTML was invented.
Yes, it’s right in the name: hypertext. Which is not just ASCII characters or a PDF.
HyperCard is largely considered hypertext – and folks built all kinds of app-like things with that.
Spreadsheets are usually considered documents and not necessarily hypertext. Lots of interactivity & reactivity in those, even if you only consider numbers.
Some documents are interactive applications, not static things.
Forms have been in HTML for over 30 years now. The web is meant to do what we’ve been shaping it to do for all that time.
Marc Andreessen (the creator of the first graphical browser aka Mosaic/Netscape Navigator) said in 1995: “The Browser Will Be the Operating System”. Chrome OS already achieved it (in a way). I remember this because it change my course of study during college.
This guy probably need to check the history first.
Yes, Cats, now relax, it’s OK. You identified some troll, identified your weakness for trolls, identified the flaw, identified the silliness, but to manifest this article…relax.
As I noted in my reply (https://twitter.com/chuck_martin/status/1355373159772393473?s=20), the bigger issue isn’t whether a browser is or isn’t an operating system (it isn’t), but that people still think in terms of “documents.”
I love that I can control my systems with http(s… because who doesn’t use TLS nowadays?) requests to the APIs I design and make a web based GUI in a matter of hours – days at most. If browsers were only document viewers, I would have to create my own resource viewer for every one of my APIs, or a resource viewer capable of targeting all my APIs, which would be a new browser…