@irenes @beka_valentine Okay. At a fundamental level, the web is and always has been about hypertext -- documents that link together. It did that well from day one, so it was natural that they'd keep adding features. Inline images, fonts, things like that are no big deal. It all more or less worked.
And then webmail came along, and it started training users to expect more from their browser -- they expected not a browser for linked documents with images and such, but a whole (shitty) OS that they use inside another (usually shitty) OS -- and training them to think that's normal.
The way it's supposed to work is that an email application on OS Y and one on OS Z speak the same protocol, so it doesn't matter that they might look different because they're both native to their platforms -- but instead, now everyone gets an equally shitty experience, and nothing is as fast or maintainable as it could be.
@irenes @beka_valentine So now instead of POP3/IMAP and HTTP and FTP and IRC and Usenet, each client speaking the open protocol, and developed specifically for what makes its own native platform good to use, we get the same shitty experience on every platform, and when whoever makes the "site" or "app" gets bored something else has to replace it from scratch.
It's not okay, and I refuse to pretend it is.
@mos_8502 @irenes @beka_valentine tbh I think this is a consequence of failures in desktop app development more than anything. The Web and the ability to build apps on it came about at just the right time to act as an offramp for developers just as more ui focused app development platforms from the hypercard->vb line of systems became unfashionable.
Everything about writing desktop apps since then has gotten harder, while writing apps for the web has never been exactly as easy as RAD stuff was, it is at least very UI focused in a way other systems aren't. Throw in cross platform (sort of) by default and I don't think it was ever going to go another way.
@mos_8502 @irenes @beka_valentine and I didn't say anything was "right". I'm just saying there were systemic trends in app dev that led people down this path beyond "webmail happened".
@megmac @irenes @beka_valentine Yeah, I'm being a bit reductive -- but the drive that created webmail was indulged, rather than being laughed out of the building, and that led, inexorably, to the enshittification of everything in tech. I knew the Web was doomed the first time I saw a word processor in a web browser. That kind of bloat, once it exists, is like discovering cancer in stage 3. It's not a question of a cure, it's a question of putting your affairs in order and enjoying the time you have left.
@mos_8502 I guess what I'm trying to get at is that it was somewhat indulged but it actually took a *long time* for that indulgence to stick. Most of that evolution up to stuff like Google docs was actually swimming pretty against the stream.
And they were doing that precisely because they were *not* being indulged elsewhere. When I say things became harder in native land I don't mean difficulty, I mean more like impedance mismatch.
I think it *was* avoidable, but the movement to "professionalize" (or Enterprisify) software development was detrimental. Microsoft burnt down an entire category of software development practices in the transition from VB to .net, which was always a play for the "think about your class structure more than your UI" enterprise world of Java.
Hell I still think it's reversible tbh. Election shows that people still want to be building native(ish) experiences, but for various reasons they'd *still* rather do it with a web base than ever touch .net or whatever MFC has become or whatever. Electron gets used to make apps that *aren't even portable*.
Imo people draw a lot of very wrong lessons from this. And "devs are lazy" is one of those wrong lessons. They work really hard to build what they do, but they do it where they're welcome.
@megmac @mos_8502 Microsoft burned down a lot of innovation in the personal computing world with its anti-competitive monopoly. The fact that anyone is reminiscing about a crap language like VB is evidence of this.
I'm surprised no one has talked about the role Netscape had in this. It walked all over web standards in an effort to maintain its dominance. Microsoft joined in the fray, and the W3C basically became follow-on yes-men of the changes.
