this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
1167 points (97.1% liked)
Programmer Humor
32410 readers
328 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yet Internet just scaled up to handle worldwide traffic, while WWW evolved into mess noone is able to implement anymore.
Inspect any major website, you'll see boilerplate of
<div><div><div><div>and unreadable pile of JavaScript programs your browser need to run to build the website. Sites should be done in a way that is still readable after you disable one element (for example disable CSS function, scripts or HTML specific tag).Internet is modular, based on stacked protocols. Want to fit Tor between TCP and HTTP? No problem. Web is also like that, build of semi-independent formats, in theory. But in practice devs are using frameworks that assume Chrome, Firefox and Safari are and would ever be the only things existing. Now if you want to develop new browser you not only need to display HTML and add other things later. You need to get all specifications of all standards working right away or sites would spectacularly break.
It's a bit of a shame that HTML went from describing documents to describing UIs. I do miss the days of simple websites, although I'm not old enough to remember the old old internet.
What's the alternative? Or an alternative I guess I should say. I agree though, I wish folks would use HTML for all documents. Like why the hell am I downloading a PDF of a thing I'm never printing? (PDFs are still acceptable for printing though.)
I don't think there's anything wrong with using HTML/XML-ish format for describing a UI (although having a standardized presentation format that all "viewers/browsers" follow exactly the same way would be nice), I'm just sad that websites have become described as UIs rather than as well-structured documents.