[dpark]

> That a cross-platform application distribution platform might have arisen anyway is beside the point. It'd have been nice to keep that separate from the locked-down hypertext platform that keeps the user in control. We've lost the latter in gaining the former, rather than having both.

You assume that HTML would have survived in the same world as this hypothetical cross-platform app ecosystem. I think you are mistaken and you can ask Gopher fans how well it works out when your platform's capabilities are completely subsumed by a more powerful platform.

If the W3C and the major browser vendors had announced an intention to stagnate and never move beyond basic hypertext documents, either another set of people would have forked and moved on without them or a full replacement would have sprung up.

[ashrk]

HTML did stagnate, in part because JS was available. How many sites expose the built-in file upload element these days? It's clearly terrible, yet hasn't improved in many, many years. Tables should have (optional) built-in sorting, obviously, but it's not there because you can just use Javascript. And so on. All they've done for, what, going on 20 years now, is prettify the tag names a bit. HTML is de-facto dead anyway, or at least on life support, just a supporting technology for a spying platform that's only there because no-one can be bothered to replace it with something better suited to that purpose. Meanwhile there's no safe-by-default way to browse hypertext. That's dead. Mixing it with app distribution already killed it. There's nothing there to lose.

[dpark]

HTML is the most popular language in the world. The core of HTML may have "stagnated" because of JS, but the alternative would probably have been extinction and replacement with something that didn't decline to include programmability.

I also don't think HTML has actually stagnated, though. HTML+CSS+JS is a solution, and it's changed a lot over the years. The HTML piece has experienced the smallest set of core changes, but that's because it already does what it needs to. Adding a modern file upload element might be nice, but it's not necessary. (Also the behavior of upload on the client side is really a browser choice. Browsers could make this a lot prettier without changing HTML at all.)

[ashrk]

> HTML is the most popular language in the world.

Like x86 assembly is, sure. Though way less well-suited to its modern purpose than that is. It's alive by accident and momentum, purely.

If it did what we needed it to do we wouldn't have burned who knows how many (tens of?) thousands of person-hours creating half-complete solutions to its various plain-as-day shortcomings. Input wrappers, table sorters, sequential image viewers, and so on. We did finally get video but it's still usually wrapped in custom UI driven by JS. It's not complete and featureful enough to exist as a good rich document format without JS (due to its long stagnation) but is also really far from being a good choice for laying out and describing applications (because it was never meant to be).

Agree that browser vendors are the ones who'd have to fix all this. The time for that passed a long time ago, of course. I just think it'd be nice to have a hypertext document network that doesn't have on-client spying as a first-class, built-in feature that you have to go way out of your way to even partially avoid. Creating Javascript and giving it such wide access was what killed any hope of that. I consider that the original sin of the modern web, that the platform itself is fundamentally and irreparably insecure (from the end user's perspective).