[nfoz]

It's a reason to proclaim that the people deciding on web standards are doing a horrible job.

Scripting should be removed from the web, not made ever more powerful....

[untog]

Yeah, god, I long for the days before Google Maps, too. Who needs that slick slippy interface when you can endlessly click arrows at the corner of a static image?

[djm_]

Ah, true nostalgia. Making the click, waiting for the image to download over 56k..only to realise you've loaded the wrong tile.

If anyone wants to recreate the experience, Streetmap.co.uk [1] is still going (somehow).

[1] http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=531500&y=181500&z=120&s...

[terabytest]

That to me sounds like you're saying cars would be better off without wheels.

[mistercow]

Suppose that's what they did with HTML5. What would happen then?

Nobody would use it. Proprietary solutions to do what WebGL and other HTML5 features do would pop up, and people would use those.

Instead, what we've got is a situation where you can actually turn off Flash and use the majority of websites without any degradation.

[randomdata]

It is a long term evolution. Eventually, application developers will build directly atop the accelerated graphics layers, freeing the browser to be just a basic virtual machine, and leaving HTML rendering to be just another app built atop that machine. But these things take time and there is a lot of legacy cruft that needs to work in the meantime.

[Wilya]

Just like native apps, except the end-user no longer has control over anything.

I can't wait.

[randomdata]

Care to elaborate? That is not the direction I pictured at all. The open standards of the web should have the opposite effect, allowing anyone to build a computer that can run the major software offerings of the time.

I do not see it really any different to how web applications are developed today, just throwing out the needless overhead. If your concerns are to be realized, it has probably already happened a long time ago.

[coldtea]

Why people keep saying this kind of stuff?

For one, whatever Tim Berner's Lee envisoned, the web is not the simple mostly textual medium it was in 1993. Get over it.

Second, for people to love reading text on the web, there was never a better time than the present. Lots of long form text by bloggers and content providers like Medium etc, combined with a widespread interest in improved readability and good typography. Plus, the fashion/preference for "minimalist" designs also helps putting emphasis on the content, even better than some 1997 site with animated gifs and black text on grey.

[cousin_it]

The universal reply to "get over it" is "if it's a problem for me, then it's a problem". Are you sure there's no grain of truth in the complaints about today's dynamic Web? How about this critique, which is hopefully more articulate? http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2011-Nov...

[untog]

Are you sure there's no grain of truth in the complaints about today's dynamic Web?

Of course there are. But no-one has really articulated an alternative vision. That post certainly doesn't.

[cousin_it]

That post's alternative vision is something that already existed not so long ago, you can learn about it in as much detail as you want...

[untog]

So we throw away all scripting? No more Google Maps? Doesn't sound very realistic to me.

[cousin_it]

IMO, browser plugins were the way forward. You can have all the fancy stuff that modern computers can do, like Google Maps or even Quake Live, and at the same time most of the web can stay simple.