Re: Next Web Focus

Simon,

Just to be clear, I am only speaking from my perspective trying to contribute as an active participant to the group, so nobody should take what I say as any kind of representation of what "the group" thinks/wants. It’s just my perspective. 

From where I stand, you are mischaracterizing what I said as “deriding.”  “Dead horse” just means it is done, a moot point, not something warranting further discussion. It is not derision, but I will note to avoid that particular turn of phrase in the future given that it can apparently be misunderstood as derision.

I’m also not deriding or opposing SoC per se, as anyone can see if they just read what I have written so far in my few posts here. With everything there is a spectrum, and SoC is no different. It can be taken to extremes and idolized as well as totally ignored and everything in between. All I would advocate for is moderation and balance of that principle against other important principles within the context of what I have said so far, which is centered around moving the Web forward.

...

I just read your blog post. Thanks for the history lesson, from your perspective. ;)

Your post paints a pretty rosy picture of what has been in reality for many developers death by a thousand cuts. I have worked across several technology platforms in my time, and the Web, despite having been around for longer than most of them, is still comparatively very immature from many perspectives, only in the last few years starting to break out of this infancy.

One thing’s for sure: millions of people have built things on the Web, despite all its problems. There is definitely a core set of goodness there for us to continue to build upon. I don’t think anyone could really dispute that. The trick is in teasing out what the good stuff we should keep is versus what we should let wane versus what we should tweak/enhance versus what we should add. 

You end with this:
"Let’s extend the Web and help it do more – but let’s do that by valuing the many strengths it already brings.”

I can’t speak for Tom Dale, but I’m pretty sure we’d all agree to that statement. The devil is in the details, as the saying goes. 

You said elsewhere here, "No. We have a values barrier here.”

I actually tend to agree with that, though probably not to the extent that you seem to be inferring. We sit in different places on the spectra and the details. I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but the Web does need to grow up and embrace the reality that what we need from the Web today is quite a bit more from what we needed in 1994 or 2000 or even 2010, and the needs will continue to grow and evolve. Trying to position the current architecture of the Web today as the optimal/all we should ever need (with some minor tweaking of standards here and there) because we’ve managed to sort of make it work thus far is just wrong, as I see it. Maybe that’s not your position, but what you have written here and in your post seem to suggest that’s where you are coming from.

Anyways, hopefully we can move past these unproductive generalizations and instead refocus on more concrete ideas around how to move things forward. 

For my part, I am indeed interested in how we can advance Web application development, in particular (which is in itself an immensely vast and fundamental problem domain). As such, I do embrace things like Web Components (the concept of which has been around FOREVER in other platforms). That kind of SoC is far more useful in app dev than, for example, semantics/structure and style. Does that mean we should do away with HTML and CSS? Not in my book. I see no reason why we can’t take a both-and approach with regard to advancing the Web. 

-a
On January 24, 2014 at 5:31:21 PM, Simon St.Laurent (simonstl@simonstl.com) wrote:

On 1/24/14 4:50 PM, Ambrose Little wrote:  
> Honestly, I don’t think we should be arguing about separation of content  
> and style at this point/in this group, nor semantics from structure.  
> That feels like a long dead horse, as far as the Web is concerned. And  
> the focus should be on what comes next for the Web. How can we build  
> upon, tweak, and improve the groundwork we have to facilitate rapid  
> application development? What do we need in the framework? What do we  
> need in the tools and how can the framework enable those?  

Yet again, I'm puzzled.  

I thought this group was focused on polyfills and extending the browser  
using the tools available within it. From my perspective, the very  
separation of concerns this derides as a dead horse is what makes  
polyfills and browser extensions possible without infinite tangles.  

Based on this message, though, it seems like the "next web" perspective  
is something much more severe, leaning toward throwing over the things  
that have worked in the past in favor of rapid application development.  

Is that really the purpose of this group?  

Thanks,  
--  
Simon St.Laurent  
http://simonstl.com/