[TheZenPsycho]

and yet despite its flaws it's become the most successful platform for content since moveable type. Java failed to do that. iOS, despite its financial success, is failing to do that. android is failing to do that. flash failed.

Aren't you the least bit curious why it succeeded despite not being to your taste? Do you think it's just accidental? That the laws of physics and rationality were suspended for one brief glorious moment in the 1990's? Are you a web creationist?

Or do you believe that there's an actual answer?

[tracker1]

I think portions of it were wide availability of web browsers, combined with the explosive adoption rates of internet usage... as time moved forward, entrenchment of the existing sites (and their quirks) got buried in...

If we'd started with xml compatible markup (all tags must close in order), and no browsers supported a quirks mode... we'd have much cleaner web browser engines and a much more usable web today.

I think that JS has a few quirks as well... so does CSS.. JS and CSS came after HTML, and even then have grown/distorted a bit. XHTML broke too many things, so we went pragmatic with HTML5. Just the same, no "new wheel" will get adopted in this space whole-sale. People have ditched XHTML and run back to HTML5.

I think a lot of things could be better, and will get better... so long as there are billions of pages/sites out there as-is, quirks mode browsers aren't going away.

[aboodman]

well-formedness? _that's_ the problem with the web? Not slow performance? Not no realistic offline story? Not a loosely-typed, dynamic language? Well-formedness.

Sigh.

[tracker1]

How much of a browser's time is spent in JS vs. rendering? How much overhead is spent of parsing/rendering? JS isn't even 25% of overhead in most sites, or even dynamic applications. Rendering of reflows, and other UI elements is. Understanding this in the scope of JS is important, as this is where it gets triggered. Hell, having something like AngularJS out of the box in the browser earlier on would have helped a lot.

Just the same, it started with well-formedness being loose, and continued from there.

[aboodman]

Sure, slow rendering/layout/performance would be a perfectly reasonable complaint about the web platform.

The well-formedness thing is, sorry to be blunt, a totally crazy thing to complain about.

Every single platform that has any popularity introduces rough edges like this over time. It's impossible not to because every single bug that introduces relaxations gets baked in as content comes to rely on it. It is impossible to ever remove those relaxations, and really, it's totally fine.

There is a cost to lack of well-formedness, but on the list of problems with the web it is waaaaay waaaay down there.

[rimantas]

"Content" is the key there. But I am at loss what exactly iOS and Android are failing to do? I think they do very well with music, movies, books, etc, thank you very much. Hypertext content? Well, we do have web for that.

[TheZenPsycho]

oh, iOS and Android are doing just fine, as of this moment. Check back in 5-10 years though.

Just how exactly do you archive that content anyway? Anything you "buy" on those platforms is not something you own. It's something you're licensing for short term use. Doesn't sound like a great outlet for culture to me. It sounds like a death trap.

[rimantas]

Well, how do you explain the fact that Web did not win on desktop? I am still puzzled why people think web should take over mobile for some reason, but never mention desktop.

  > Just how exactly do you archive that content anyway?

Why should I archive anything? I don't archive web pages I visit either.

  > Anything you "buy" on those platforms is not something you own.

I don't care if I "own" something. Owning for the sake of owning means nothing to me. If I pay for the book it is because I want to read it. If I pay for the music, it is because I want to listen to it. Even CDs I do own are now represented by their cloudy ghosts using iTunes Match. Why? Because they are always there. I don't have to walk with backpack full of CDs just in case I'd like to listen to particular song. I can get it on any of the devices I use. Yeah, I don't have a install DVD for every app I bought. I don't care. I change my phone: they are already there. I get new Mac: I go to App Store app and just click "Install" for every app I want to have on that machine. Maybe to some it is a death trap, I don't know.

[TheZenPsycho]

"Well, how do you explain the fact that Web did not win on desktop? I am still puzzled why people think web should take over mobile for some reason, but never mention desktop."

Define "win". From my point of view, the web has not only won desktop, but utterly dominated it, and relegated the rest of the OS to a mere substrate for webpages. The only things it hasn't really replaced are photoshop, final cut and protools. It's only a matter of time.

"Why should I archive anything? I don't archive web pages I visit either"

oh boy. Paging Jason Scott. Jason Scott on aisle 12.

" I don't care. I change my phone: they are already there. I get new Mac:"

I'm glad you can thrive only on corporately produced content you license for brief periods of time. Many people out in the world are not corporations, and produce things that they care about. Many use computers to do this. Most care about the thing they made, and not about the tech they made it with. And so it ends up in these closed off little data silos and proprietary formats- not only are these things not backed up, they can't be backed up.

And then those people die, and there is nothing left of that person except what they made on the iPad with iOS6. The apps the things live inside are not compatible with the newer iOS. When that iPad dies, it's like the father, the lost son, the missing daughter- they die for a second time.

But you know, it's good that owning that stuff doesn't matter to you, and therefore should not matter to anyone else.

ta.

[Joeri]

The web did win on the desktop. New desktop apps are web apps, except for clients to sync your files with a cloud service. The popular desktop apps all predate the rise of the web.

Also, having books and movies stuck in your amazon or apple account is convenient for consumption, but horrible for creation. You can't DO anything with that content. I've wanted to extract interesting stuff from books I own before and was forced to make screengrabs. If you don't understand what's wrong with the media rental model, go read "the right to read" by stallman.

[ldng]

It is already there ... as long as the provider allows it. _that_ is the death trap. You can download a file (and locally backup it), not a stream.

Well, yes, technically, we as tech savvy people could, but the commoners (not to say technophobics), they don't know how.

and that is how it is designed. You don't need backup, it's in the cloud. What happens when it is not anymore ?

It is not owning but rather preserving that is the concern. Is everything worth preserving though, I don't know.

[sigmaml]

It is not clear what you refer to when you say ``buy".

By the way, you have drifted away from discussing the technological aspects of the Web. This line of argument doesn't help establish why HTML/JavaScript/CSS are better.

[TheZenPsycho]

HTML can be archived. Backed up. Saved. Become a part of history.

Apps cannot.

That's why HTML matters.

[stoptalkingshit]

The man accusing me of "web creationism" jumps from "HTML etc suck and were poorly designed from the start" to "there's no explanation for their success". And in the same breath you engage in magical thinking regarding cause of the popularity of the web (indeed, I would bet you aren't capable of mentally separating "the web" from implementation details like HTML, CSS etc). Creationism was highly "successful" for the longest time too. Bravo on looking an absolute fool.