If we stand still, we go backwards
Calling for a moratorium sounds very dramatic, but I suspect PPK wanted to use dramatic language to make the point that we're not putting enough thought and exercising enough caution about what we're introducing to the web. These are not free experimental features we can add willy-nilly that we can easily remove when we don't like them anymore. They have the potential to introduce an incredible amount of globally shared technical debt if they're bad enough.
Between standing still, and desperately adding features to make the web competitive with native platforms, I'm inclined to slow it down. I don't think the web is seriously threatened by native platforms. Even when we did experience feature freezing between 2001-2007, the web remained king despite attacks from Flash.
I don't think the web is under real threat from mobile native platforms. It's nothing that performance tuning and Moore's law can't address in time.
The author's examples of inflated user expectations are unconvincing. Transferring data across the globe is the whole point of wide area networking, far predating WWW. Making online purchases has been possible since the early days of the web.
Furthermore, the author's definition of "native" is revisionist, placing it at a highly recent time frame, and categorizing it by features that are semantically disparate.
So-called "progressive loading" and no installation process have been traits of native applications for a long time. In fact, at a primal level, the process of installing a program boils down to a copy operation.
Notice how in the last paragraph, the examples of the web's feature richness are all intrinsically limited browser reimplementations of native interfaces that exist in parallel with the host OS.
"Just because it's there, doesn't mean you must learn it and use it"
You're correct! Except that this is not the way things work in the professional world, and by refusing to learn or use a new technique or library you're stunting your personal development as a tech professional.
ppk's argument boils down to progress outpacing need. Businesses desire the bleeding edge in their online-facing products and if you want to be attractive as talent you need to keep up with the latest development trends. This can lead to frustration, barely getting the time to build stuff with your new skills before the next big framework comes along. The latest and greatest is hip but might not be entirely necessary. This is where we need to focus our attention and strike a balance.
"Hello world" is doable in 3 lines instead of 5, granted. But for more complicated development.. http://www.allenpike.com/2015/javascript-framework-fatigue/
Question: is there ANY environment or language that has fantastic support and is continually improving? Any open source one?
I agree with all of the points in this article. Even if you believe that PPK is 100% right about the "problem", I truly can't grok the notion that a moratorium would somehow "solve" anything. From my observation, when standards are actually under development and look like they will have first class support in the browser, proliferation of stopgap solutions is much lower because people would rather wait for "standard" support of whatever feature they're trying to implement. Also I think that aside from IE, browsers do a good job of getting standard features done, which is sort of amazing considering they don't have the "benefit" of top-down bureaucratic governance like the "native" platforms. As a notable exception WebRTC is a bit of a clusterfog it seems, but I'm sure that will get worked through without too much ado.
> "Hello world" is simpler now than it has ever been.
Yes, it is simpler for ordinary people. For developers, however, the web is getting more and more convoluted.
Who cares how many lines it takes to do Hello World? Honestly, that isn't a benchmark for any meaningful thing.
The connection kept resetting for me, so here is the Google Cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:f-pnPOu...
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I don't web develop often. As a user, mobile web is usually more usable than a native app - not in terms of whether or not it works, but in terms of usability, flow of actions, and predictability. Cut, copy, and paste work in the browser but rarely in native apps. Other little things too, items too little for a project architect to notice or a punch list to pick up.
The other half of what killed Blackberry was Microsoft Activesync. Blackberry's email service required you have set up their Blackberry Enterprise Server (or their lower-performing cloud-hosted Blackberry Internet Service) and connected this to your email account. BES had an "agent": a service that would log into your email account every 30 seconds, check for new email, and then forward this to your Blackberry over the Blackberry network (which is why you had to pay the $10 "Blackberry Fee"). Activesync (I think) used Exchange mail rules to do the same thing, and the iPhone mail client could use Activesync.
It was that "one-two punch" that took out Blackberry:
* iPhones were cool. Androids were cheap. * Activesync comes with Exchange, no other server setup necessary. * Works with normal carrier service; no $10 Blackberry fee.Something like "If the web stops, it goes backwards" or "The web must develop to survive" would be a more contextual title here.
"Native apps are looking to gain the web's advantages too [...] If we stop, we lose."
Who is "we" and why are they competing against some implied "them"? When are we going to accept the shortcomings of both the web and native applications and figure out a solution together to benefit humankind?
I appreciate that this comes across perfectly formatted for w3m. Just shows that we can push for advanced features while maintaining compatibility for the simplest experiences.
Some of the frustration for new features comes when developers ignore compatibility, but that's not a necessary part of pushing the web forward, just an indication of sloppiness.
Every new feature brings new challenges. The solution is not to solve challenges by stopping progress but rather to respond to challenges as they come. This means more work, but that's okay. There are more people to do the work every day.
"Also, world's first web site[1] still works in modern browsers".
... and half the links on it are broken. That's one of the things I don't like on the web, content slowly disappear, links are unidirectional, etc.
Exactly. Users control the internet. Almost everyone has this backwards.