Re: [whatwg] HTML6 proposal for single-page apps without Javascript

> On Mar 20, 2015, at 12:10 PM, Brian Kardell <bkardell@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> A few things worth noting:  First, we've actually tried a bunch of
> this before, and you're not using it now so I think we can say that at
> some level it was unsuccessful.  

Thanks for the feedback here. I just had a quick look at some of the past proposals (XForms, Microdata, & XSLT), and they all had clear usability & design issues to me.  For this, I focused on presenting the most obvious, usable solution, while trying to be very simple & intuitive to a web developer.  A usability test would be to see if people understand what I’m proposing.

> Second, I am going to submit for
> comment that there are a couple of significant reasons why it failed
> and why I don't expect we'd have much more success with it if we were
> to take it up right now and you can kind of sum them up like this:
> There isn't something close enough to actually emerging that remotely
> looks ready and standards bodies are historically terrible at that
> class of problem.

You’re looking at it from bottom-up.  They’re all trying to implement the missing MVC framework in browsers, and are just working on implementation issues.  Javascript implementation have no real relevance to HTML.  For example, would you implement React’s framework or API design in the browsers if they solved everything?  What would be the next step in your statement?  

I think we really need a top-down focus on a separate HTML-based solution: find the problem, and solve for that.  Not, find a solution, and fit that into another problem domain.

> It's a really, really, really hard problem to abstract something at
> such a high level which meets all of the use cases people actually
> have which plays into why there are so many ever-changing solutions in
> the ecosystem - they're actually trying to figure it out and that's a
> good thing.  It's rarely as simple as it appears at first blush and
> good ideas breed new possibilities of even better realizations.  As
> the number of people using these tools increases, we gain additional
> input and data - Along the way they are helping to identify where
> there _are_ commonalities and suggest lower level additions that can
> be standardized as well as providing necessary failed experiments that
> go into finding a good solution.  

A lot of the work appears to be focused on Javascript issues and optimizations at this point.  These frameworks were originally designed to solve the same missing MVC framework problem, but now they’re working through details of Javascript implementation, like Angular’s design issues and React’s virtual DOM optimization technique.  Their current work would have little relevance to something outside Javascript.

Also, something like React.js is 400kb, and that’s without data modeling, and people are saying we should mix multiple frameworks.  Do we really want to attach 400kb or more of Javascript to every web page?  Can we not?  There’s a latency & power costs associated with it.  If we let the browser handle the MVC framework, then it can manage power and memory on its own, while reducing initial latency.

> In general, see
> http://extensiblewebmanifesto.org or search for articles/posts related
> for the thoughts of a lot of us in the community on topics like this
> and, if you have an idea for what would be better - find some people
> to help you build it, give people an opportunity to try it and see...
> Where you can't, raise interesting questions about why and lets build
> up a platform where we can make reasonable explanations to build up
> higher-level proposals.

I do expect this idea will take years to work through, and will try to gain some support while taking other past/present/future attempts into account, in both HTML and Javascript.

Already, though, for some reason this proposal went viral. Search Twitter for HTML6 to see what I mean. There are lots of discussions around it out there now, including blog posts and news articles.  (It’s already big in Japan.)  Here’s an example blog post that discusses this proposal: http://blog.smartbear.com/news/html6-apis-as-natural-friends/

With hundreds or thousands of shares, retweets, upvotes, etc..  it looks like a lot of people want a solution like this.  I don’t know how it happened but I believe this represents peoples wide dissatisfaction with having to use Javascript frameworks. 

-bobby
---
Bobby Mozumder
Editor-in-Chief
FutureClaw Magazine
mozumder@futureclaw.com
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Received on Monday, 23 March 2015 08:45:12 UTC