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

> On Mar 28, 2015, at 12:27 AM, Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 2015-03-27 at 16:04 -0400, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> 
>>  It seems like:
>> 
>> - It's getting harder and harder to do simple things.  Too many
>> JavaScript frameworks and libraries.  Too much complexity. Authoring 
>> should not require extensive programming skills. (Whatever happened 
>> to the read/write web?).
> 
> The frameworks make mindblowingly complex things possible or even 
> easy. I don't think they make anything harder, unless it's choosing a 
> framework.
> 
> The read/write Web is not related to this at all.
> 

The read/write Web is 100% related to this.  It’s the basic design pattern of the web.  And many, many people are using these advanced frameworks to just improve on this basic web user experience.  

If you look at https://builtwith.angularjs.org you’ll see that many of the sites are just using Angular to improve page load speeds.  They’re not doing anything more advanced than showing a blog or processing forms.  They’re not building advanced interactive GUI applications like Google Maps or building games or anything like that. They’re just using these frameworks to fix the web's full-page refresh latency problem.  

That’s it.  Nothing more. And they call them “apps” because of they use Angular.

The Ember.js framework is being helped/funded by Bustle. Check out bustle.com, and you’ll see that they’re not doing anything more advanced than showing articles from a CMS. That’s it.  They just get to serve these articles really, really quickly. They don’t have to do that, but they do because a responsive website helps the user experience.  That’s the read/write web.

So why isn’t the web this responsive by default?  Why does the web have to load full pages?  That’s clunky and not app-like.  The default condition should be the best condition.

Meanwhile, apps like Instagram caught on because they of their responsiveness. Their developers prioritized responsiveness when they launched.  Facebook saw far more use on their mobile app once they rewrote it natively because the web version was largely unusable.

The fact is the basic web architecture is broken in terms of a modern user experience.  You’re competing against native apps, and you’re losing, because the web has a terrible by-default out-of-the-box user experience.  The only way to fix it is to bring in these frameworks, which is a major headache.  What high-school Tumblr girl is going to learn how to use Angular? That’s big nope right there.  This page load delay might have been acceptable on a 68030 NeXT when you had all the time in the world in the office, but when browsing on a mobile device in the subway, it’s not good.

Again, this is a major, major problem with the fundamental web architecture that I can’t emphasize enough. The web's usability is not good, and it needs to be fixed if you don’t want to lose against native apps.

You can do that by including a native MVC framework within the browser by default, as part of the HTML spec.

The sooner we do this, the better the web will be for everyone, and not just Javascript developers.

Thanks.

-bobby
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Bobby Mozumder
Editor-in-Chief
FutureClaw Magazine
mozumder@futureclaw.com
+1-240-745-5287
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Received on Monday, 30 March 2015 02:49:02 UTC