Towards a Modern Web Stack (Ian 'Hixie' Hickson)(accounts.google.com)
accounts.google.com
Towards a Modern Web Stack (Ian 'Hixie' Hickson)
https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?continue=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/preview&dsh=S-184152828:1675268317749309&flowEntry=ServiceLogin&followup=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/preview&ifkv=AWnogHegeZW9fXvI96qayA9snJIV1D2msE5L35t9Bews9WyQsABGUoYynvMtOLgAhmdS60518mdTSQ&ltmpl=docs&nojavascript=1&osid=1&service=wise
12 comments
[deleted]
*hugs*
Was pretty surprising to me seeing you embrace the Flutter/CanvasKit plan, take it as a good prototype & support furthering this. The web has always seemed so rich in virtue & principle, gives us so much, and I always would have assumed you saw & got some of that, some of the worth & dignity of the web endeavour. This feels reaching for something so utterly & different & opposed to that shared medium we have, and I cant comprehend how dark one's perception must be to walk the path of abandoning a shared medium for structure-less freeform running code.
I just wish I saw any hope for an standard or interoperability, saw this as a starting point for better or more inter-networking of systems, which has been one of the most brilliant & faith-building-in-humanity things I've been so fortunate to experience the rise of, has been so inspirational. The web has been so obviously & clearly better than everything else in computing by being a medium, has so many virtues by being just self-modylifying documents. It has been stunningly inspirational.
By compare, this feels like walking into the dark. There is no medium of exchange here; just a screen with bitmaps. I want to have some at least vague sense that someone other than developers would be enhanced by a supplantative would-be-media like what is proposed here, want to imagine some real core connective substance that is at least as good as what we have.
I dont see any cognizance or respect from very good long standing web folk like yourself that this kind of effort has huge downsides and risk to users. Rather than everyone sharing a same web kernel, any developer can build their own app kernel & reinvent everything... it's bold & powerful an idea, and I struggle enormously to say (so very conservatively): no, this is a frontier we should not explore. I cherish exploration so much. But this doesnt seem like a medium to me, it doesnt seem like it's anything aside from giving everything we have & share up completely, to embrace a path of starting from nothing, and this time having no common interchange to work forward together with. Users having not a rich document, but just having a shitty low grade unintelligible illegible mess: having only running code. The idea of that, to me, resembles an attack, against the web, against the idea of inter-networking, and against people.
Hugs back Hixie, holy frelling frak!
I just wish I saw any hope for an standard or interoperability, saw this as a starting point for better or more inter-networking of systems, which has been one of the most brilliant & faith-building-in-humanity things I've been so fortunate to experience the rise of, has been so inspirational. The web has been so obviously & clearly better than everything else in computing by being a medium, has so many virtues by being just self-modylifying documents. It has been stunningly inspirational.
By compare, this feels like walking into the dark. There is no medium of exchange here; just a screen with bitmaps. I want to have some at least vague sense that someone other than developers would be enhanced by a supplantative would-be-media like what is proposed here, want to imagine some real core connective substance that is at least as good as what we have.
I dont see any cognizance or respect from very good long standing web folk like yourself that this kind of effort has huge downsides and risk to users. Rather than everyone sharing a same web kernel, any developer can build their own app kernel & reinvent everything... it's bold & powerful an idea, and I struggle enormously to say (so very conservatively): no, this is a frontier we should not explore. I cherish exploration so much. But this doesnt seem like a medium to me, it doesnt seem like it's anything aside from giving everything we have & share up completely, to embrace a path of starting from nothing, and this time having no common interchange to work forward together with. Users having not a rich document, but just having a shitty low grade unintelligible illegible mess: having only running code. The idea of that, to me, resembles an attack, against the web, against the idea of inter-networking, and against people.
Hugs back Hixie, holy frelling frak!
I think my attitude to this stuff evolved after seeing that even with all the work we did with HTML, virtually nobody actually benefits from it.
In theory, HTML is device independent. In practice, we can't even get web apps to work on desktop and mobile, to the point where even sites like Wikipedia, the simplest and most obvious place where HTML should Just Work across devices, has a whole fricking separate subdomain for mobile.
In theory, HTML gives users ultimate control over presentation. In practice, after _years_ of trying to make alternate style sheets a reality, not a single browser in common use even has a UI for them. Nobody cares. A few people with extensions might occasionally make some minor tweak, but that's about it.
In theory, HTML is accessible. In practice, despite decades of advocacy, basic sites fail utterly to be accessible even for basic things because people ignore all of HTML's semantics, they just bolt things together to work for the common sighted able-bodied user and then, _if they are paid enough_, they _might_ just slap on some ARIA attributes to make it vaguely work for people with accessibility tools.
If HTML was all the things we wanted it to be, we designed it to be, if reality actually matched the fantasies we tell ourselves in working group meetings, then mobile apps wouldn't be written once for iOS and once for Android and then once again for desktop web, they'd be written once, in HTML, and that's what everyone would use. You wouldn't have an app store, you'd have the web. You wouldn't follow a link on your phone only to have it redirect to a locally-installed non-web application, it would just stay in your browser. Developers are scrambling to get out of the web and into the mobile app stores.
The reality is that for all of the work that we've put into HTML, and CSS, and the DOM, it has fundamentally utterly failed to deliver on its promise.
It's even worse than that, actually, because all of the things we've built aren't just not doing what we want, they're holding developers back. People build their applications on frameworks that _abstract out_ all the APIs we build for browsers, and _even with those frameworks_ developers are hamstrung by weird limitations of the web.
The parts of the web that have actually delivered are the ephemerality and the security model, the indexability (but only for content, not apps), deep linkability, and the platform-independence. We can keep all those, and throw out the decades of legacy that's holding us back, and we will lose nothing, we will only gain as we unleash the kinds of amazing interfaces that developers can build when you give them the raw bedrock APIs that other platforms already give their developers.
In theory, HTML is device independent. In practice, we can't even get web apps to work on desktop and mobile, to the point where even sites like Wikipedia, the simplest and most obvious place where HTML should Just Work across devices, has a whole fricking separate subdomain for mobile.
In theory, HTML gives users ultimate control over presentation. In practice, after _years_ of trying to make alternate style sheets a reality, not a single browser in common use even has a UI for them. Nobody cares. A few people with extensions might occasionally make some minor tweak, but that's about it.
In theory, HTML is accessible. In practice, despite decades of advocacy, basic sites fail utterly to be accessible even for basic things because people ignore all of HTML's semantics, they just bolt things together to work for the common sighted able-bodied user and then, _if they are paid enough_, they _might_ just slap on some ARIA attributes to make it vaguely work for people with accessibility tools.
If HTML was all the things we wanted it to be, we designed it to be, if reality actually matched the fantasies we tell ourselves in working group meetings, then mobile apps wouldn't be written once for iOS and once for Android and then once again for desktop web, they'd be written once, in HTML, and that's what everyone would use. You wouldn't have an app store, you'd have the web. You wouldn't follow a link on your phone only to have it redirect to a locally-installed non-web application, it would just stay in your browser. Developers are scrambling to get out of the web and into the mobile app stores.
The reality is that for all of the work that we've put into HTML, and CSS, and the DOM, it has fundamentally utterly failed to deliver on its promise.
It's even worse than that, actually, because all of the things we've built aren't just not doing what we want, they're holding developers back. People build their applications on frameworks that _abstract out_ all the APIs we build for browsers, and _even with those frameworks_ developers are hamstrung by weird limitations of the web.
The parts of the web that have actually delivered are the ephemerality and the security model, the indexability (but only for content, not apps), deep linkability, and the platform-independence. We can keep all those, and throw out the decades of legacy that's holding us back, and we will lose nothing, we will only gain as we unleash the kinds of amazing interfaces that developers can build when you give them the raw bedrock APIs that other platforms already give their developers.
Ultimately, HTML/CSS are too low level tools for most people. We should have had Flutter/AMP like features (sans specific company dependency), right in the browser.
It'd been amazing if people can write <appBar></appBar> and get a consistent appBar that works in different display sizes and comes with accessibility built in; in all browsers. We have done so, in flutter, in iOS, in Android. But why did the browsers never bother? I remember HTML4 feeling dumb and HTML made more sense when I learned about HTML5 proposal. It finally made sense how HTML should progress but then suddenly, after years, everything is still the same?
As for your last paragraph, you mention how web actually delivered in terms of indexability and I'm really disappointed that Flutter (your primary focus right now I assume) is not prioritizing this. Flutter is amazing but it really needs to deliver what web delivered and them some.
It'd been amazing if people can write <appBar></appBar> and get a consistent appBar that works in different display sizes and comes with accessibility built in; in all browsers. We have done so, in flutter, in iOS, in Android. But why did the browsers never bother? I remember HTML4 feeling dumb and HTML made more sense when I learned about HTML5 proposal. It finally made sense how HTML should progress but then suddenly, after years, everything is still the same?
As for your last paragraph, you mention how web actually delivered in terms of indexability and I'm really disappointed that Flutter (your primary focus right now I assume) is not prioritizing this. Flutter is amazing but it really needs to deliver what web delivered and them some.
Thank you for all of your work, but kindly, you just built the wrong things. No one needed <section> and <aside> they needed <tabs> and <accordion>. The story goes that you grepped the whole web and discovered folks needed section and aside. Why didn't I see them anywhere in my work as a developer? And why didn't they do anything?
Also, the quality wasn't there on what you shipped. The form controls are ugly and non-functional. They needed to be designed, *by designers*! Not everything is an engineering problem.
You only kind of achieved the first part of the extensible web manifesto, and never even tried the second part (paving the cow paths with higher level solutions).
And now the WhatWG is as stuck as HTML/XHTML ever was at the W3C. Maybe even more so. You got so much done, but by force of personality instead of systems that encourage contributions from lots of diverse people. Dictatorships are never going to work without the benevolent dictator. They are inherently unstable systems.
The focus on web components was a decade+ long distraction that didn't take into account the needs of framework authors but instead saw them as a competitor. It was a solution looking for a problem. I interviewed around 30 developers and almost all of them said they either tried WC and didn't like it or hadn't tried it and didn't want to.
* One dev said, "web components only kind of fixes a problem I had 10 years ago." * Another, at a co that uses WC extensively, said, "web components are a solution to big company problems but know using them will add a year and a half to any development timeline." (paraphrasing, but you get the idea) * Even a company built around web components said that it wou ld really be better as separate technologies rather then bundled, "give me style scoping separate from templating and slots".
You didn't solve the problems devs find challenging. Frameworks do. The existence of frameworks on the web is a feature, not a bug. And the reasons people use frameworks are diverse, but range from: team dynamics (having one right way to do things, documentation, easier to TL) to literally making it possible for devs to ship the features they are asked to ship. You can't really argue with, "I couldn't build these complex features without frameworks". These devs don't want even lower level solutions.
Developers mostly don't want the assembly language of the web, they want their chosen frameworks to have excellent DX and the UX they produce to be fantastic. When we see frameworks as a core customer/partner for web APIs, things turn out a lot better.
And, now for my childish moment, I told you back then about design systems and the need to support them properly. I told you it was the way folks were going to be building UI soon. You didn't listen. And that set the web back 10-15 years. I literally had to get a job as PM of Web UI at Chrome to correct this mistake. That is happening now. We're shipping container queries, scope, nesting, style queries, state queries and a host of other features devs tell us they need to architect component systems. I know "people are going to be building pages made out of 100s or 1000s of components" probably sounded wild at the time, but that is the thing about listening to your developers, they know what they need. They understand the biggest problems they face. As a PM, every day I assume I don't know what devs need, so I ask them.
HTML is an incredibly accessible technology for nearly any new developer, designer, or content creator to learn in a basic way. That is a strength that should weigh in heavily. We don't need to throw out HTML and CSS... we just need to fix mistakes that were made.
Also, the quality wasn't there on what you shipped. The form controls are ugly and non-functional. They needed to be designed, *by designers*! Not everything is an engineering problem.
You only kind of achieved the first part of the extensible web manifesto, and never even tried the second part (paving the cow paths with higher level solutions).
And now the WhatWG is as stuck as HTML/XHTML ever was at the W3C. Maybe even more so. You got so much done, but by force of personality instead of systems that encourage contributions from lots of diverse people. Dictatorships are never going to work without the benevolent dictator. They are inherently unstable systems.
The focus on web components was a decade+ long distraction that didn't take into account the needs of framework authors but instead saw them as a competitor. It was a solution looking for a problem. I interviewed around 30 developers and almost all of them said they either tried WC and didn't like it or hadn't tried it and didn't want to.
* One dev said, "web components only kind of fixes a problem I had 10 years ago." * Another, at a co that uses WC extensively, said, "web components are a solution to big company problems but know using them will add a year and a half to any development timeline." (paraphrasing, but you get the idea) * Even a company built around web components said that it wou ld really be better as separate technologies rather then bundled, "give me style scoping separate from templating and slots".
You didn't solve the problems devs find challenging. Frameworks do. The existence of frameworks on the web is a feature, not a bug. And the reasons people use frameworks are diverse, but range from: team dynamics (having one right way to do things, documentation, easier to TL) to literally making it possible for devs to ship the features they are asked to ship. You can't really argue with, "I couldn't build these complex features without frameworks". These devs don't want even lower level solutions.
Developers mostly don't want the assembly language of the web, they want their chosen frameworks to have excellent DX and the UX they produce to be fantastic. When we see frameworks as a core customer/partner for web APIs, things turn out a lot better.
And, now for my childish moment, I told you back then about design systems and the need to support them properly. I told you it was the way folks were going to be building UI soon. You didn't listen. And that set the web back 10-15 years. I literally had to get a job as PM of Web UI at Chrome to correct this mistake. That is happening now. We're shipping container queries, scope, nesting, style queries, state queries and a host of other features devs tell us they need to architect component systems. I know "people are going to be building pages made out of 100s or 1000s of components" probably sounded wild at the time, but that is the thing about listening to your developers, they know what they need. They understand the biggest problems they face. As a PM, every day I assume I don't know what devs need, so I ask them.
HTML is an incredibly accessible technology for nearly any new developer, designer, or content creator to learn in a basic way. That is a strength that should weigh in heavily. We don't need to throw out HTML and CSS... we just need to fix mistakes that were made.
*hugs* sorry for my failings
> the kinds of amazing interfaces that developers can build when you give them the raw bedrock APIs that other platforms already give their developers.
They don't provide just the "raw bedrock APIs". They also provide a plethora of high-level APIs, including controls, layouts etc.
They don't provide just the "raw bedrock APIs". They also provide a plethora of high-level APIs, including controls, layouts etc.
I commented on twitter, but I'll comment here as well:
> By providing low-level primitives instead, applications could ship with their own implementations of high-level concepts like layout, widgets, and gestures, enabling a much richer set of interactions and custom experiences with much less effort on the part of the developer.
This means that even 20 years from now all the "UI frameworks" will keep busy reinventing the same dozen-or-so primitive controls: avatars, buttons, tabs.
The value of other systems isn't just in providing the most primitive of primitives. The value is also in providing the right set of high-level APIs.
Building a fully-accessible properly behaving combobox from scratch using only WebGPU primitives? Good luck with that. Meanwhile elsewhere I can just reach for one, and have it available, with all the expected platform behaviour. Same goes for hundreds, if not thousands, little things that you need to account for.
If the quest for the future of the web doesn't include something like https://open-ui.org on the roadmap, it has failed before even starting. Because the future in the document is already here. And there are vanishingly few companies that have the wherewithal and technical acumen to pull off building a UI from scratch.
> By providing low-level primitives instead, applications could ship with their own implementations of high-level concepts like layout, widgets, and gestures, enabling a much richer set of interactions and custom experiences with much less effort on the part of the developer.
This means that even 20 years from now all the "UI frameworks" will keep busy reinventing the same dozen-or-so primitive controls: avatars, buttons, tabs.
The value of other systems isn't just in providing the most primitive of primitives. The value is also in providing the right set of high-level APIs.
Building a fully-accessible properly behaving combobox from scratch using only WebGPU primitives? Good luck with that. Meanwhile elsewhere I can just reach for one, and have it available, with all the expected platform behaviour. Same goes for hundreds, if not thousands, little things that you need to account for.
If the quest for the future of the web doesn't include something like https://open-ui.org on the roadmap, it has failed before even starting. Because the future in the document is already here. And there are vanishingly few companies that have the wherewithal and technical acumen to pull off building a UI from scratch.
That link is broken, FWIW, the correct link is https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC...
This is exactly the same thoughts I had before, having a new sort of framework on top of WASM instead of using the HTML/CSS/JS framework, specifically for building new applications. Glad to see this is on your mind as well.
There's 0 user agency to this scheme.
Developers (some) might enjoy this but this is bad for humankind. A garbage fire of Flash, forever & ever. Un-web. Having no high level interfaces to stand upon, using the web as a low level pixel-out target is the worst look a web company could propose, is deeply betraying to one of the only technological projects that has expanded human liberty. This is a horrible mis-step in the technosocial society.
And the intro sections attempt to malign seems intense weak sauce. "Quirky" feels like mostly works pretty great, for a huge huge number of the largest rank of developers- web developers. But oh no, visual centering is hard! Burn it down! Oh no there are some oddly named input gestures (which?), burn it down! Based off the proliferation of design systems (& having worked on a few), styling components is not on my list of complaints at all. I think many working developers handle what we have fine & are not nearly as restrained or encumbered as this slander puts-down.
This feels like an elite concern & self-justification that is unhinged from the real world. Where do developers sign up to say they dont have the awful terrible miserable forsaken life this post declares to be our conditions, needing total revolution?
The harm is just so great; blowing up our shared language to turn the web into a low level platform for pixels. This is the fall of information-society Babel, a fools quest, of ruin. Scattering us to many totally unique utterly unrelated development platforms, none of which have any power any web-extensions, any user scripting. This is a control technology, slams the door on the holistic better nature of the web, and that is an awful plight to perpetrate against the user, a sad & dark leaving of a bright information society to head into the Dark Forest of computing. What is the meat, what justifies this attempt to kill structured hypermedia & replace the world wide web with a web of bitmaps?