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from the things-expand-to-exceed-the-space-provided dept.
A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, but I was still surprised that a large fraction of the web was inaccessible. Some blogs with lightweight styling were readable, as were pages by academics who hadn't updated the styling on their website since 1995. But very few commercial websites were usable (other than Google). When I measured my connection, I found that the bandwidth was roughly comparable to what I got with a 56k modem in the 90s. The latency and packetloss were significantly worse than the average day on dialup: latency varied between 500ms and 1000ms and packetloss varied between 1% and 10%. Those numbers are comparable to what I'd see on dialup on a bad day.
Despite my connection being only a bit worse than it was in the 90s, the vast majority of the web wouldn't load. Why shouldn't the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? It would be one thing if I tried to watch youtube and read pinterest. It's hard to serve videos and images without bandwidth. But my online interests are quite boring from a media standpoint. Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript. In fact, I recently tried using w3m (a terminal-based web browser that, by default, doesn't support css, javascript, or even images) for a week and it turns out there are only two websites I regularly visit that don't really work in w3m (twitter and zulip, both fundamentally text based sites, at least as I use them)[1].
More recently, I was reminded of how poorly the web works for people on slow connections when I tried to read a joelonsoftware post while using a flaky mobile connection. The HTML loaded but either one of the five CSS requests or one of the thirteen javascript requests timed out, leaving me with a broken page. Instead of seeing the article, I saw three entire pages of sidebar, menu, and ads before getting to the title because the page required some kind of layout modification to display reasonably. Pages are often designed so that they're hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it's quite common for at least one depedency to fail. After refreshing the page twice, the page loaded as it was supposed to and I was able to read the blog post, a fairly compelling post on eliminating dependencies.
[1] excluding internal Microsoft stuff that's required for work. Many of the sites are IE only and don't even work in edge. I didn't try those sites in w3m but I doubt they'd work! In fact, I doubt that even half of the non-IE specific internal sites would work in w3m.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Tuesday September 17 2019, @12:03AM (4 children)
The calculator in my phone can do square and cube roots, as well as the full tan/arc tan/coding/whatever, no web browser needed.
The activity app can tell me at a glance whether any two dates are x number of days apart, so I won't even need to look at my laptop. wc gives me the number of words and lines, a simple regex splits the word list into letters, run through sort, then a one-liner to get the total for each letter. So anything you can do on the web app I can do on my laptop Wii's web browser.
Same as anyone else who cares to set up their computer to do similarly silly things.
Web browsers can disappear tomorrow and the world won't stop. There's absolutely nothing a web browser can do that can't be done without one, except run malware.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday September 17 2019, @01:13AM
As of 2019, the web browser with plurality usage share in the United States (my home country and SN's) is Safari for iOS (and other browsers for iOS using the same WebKit engine). iOS isn't made for end user scripting. As far as I'm aware, scripting is considered a "truck" feature in the late Steve Jobs's analogy [macworld.com]. Swift Playgrounds exists as a rudimentary scripting environment, but last I checked, Swift Playgrounds was made for iPad, not for iPhone. So this means a lot of people are "doing something wrong" by this metric, and many of them could be your customers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by vux984 on Tuesday September 17 2019, @04:08PM (2 children)
facepalm
I'm not suggesting you need a webapp to calculate tangents. Do you really think anyone here would suggest that?
I'm suggesting a webapp that does something useful might need to calculate tangents as part of its actual functionality; and that pure HTML+CSS while great for what it is, is not sufficient for a proper application. Those were not examples of applications those were examples of tiny bits of functionality that an application might need.
An app that lets you plan a route on a map interactively on a map might report all kinds of route information, distance, elevation changes, maximum incline. It might let you drag points around. It might show hover information about the point under the cursor (elevation, terrain, long+lat, points-of-interest tag info, etc. Save the route; share it with your run/cycle/hike buddies, coordinate meeting up. And record your metrics while you complete it.
Deliver the same above interactive route planning app to androids, linux, windows, macs, ios. Run without additional local installation or permission steps, and inherently always be running the current version.
There's not much if anything that HAS to be a web-browser application; but web delivered applications simplify a lot of issues with deploying and maintaining and updating traditional applications. And web delivered applications will need more functionality than HTML + CSS provide.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 17 2019, @08:40PM (1 child)
.tan {
--tan-term1: var(--angle);
--tan-term2: calc((1/3) * var(--angle) * var(--angle) * var(--angle));
--tan-term3: calc((2 / 15) * var(--angle) * var(--angle) * var(--angle) * var(--angle) * var(--angle));
--tan-term4: calc((17/315) * var(--angle) * var(--angle) * var(--angle) * var(--angle) * var(--angle) * var(--angle) * var(--angle));
--tan: calc(var(--tan-term1) + var(--tan-term2) + var(--tan-term3) + var(--tan-term4));
}
The fact that people here only seem to claim things can't be done due to their own incredulity is fascinating. HTML\CSS is very powerful, the fact you don't use that power doesn't change that.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Monday September 23 2019, @04:21AM
Meh, even when I'd posted it, i already had a table lookup solution in my head. (much like how kids did trig before calculators in the 60s... using the sin/cos/tan chart ).
Second, to do this, may be interesting on an academic level; but anyone suggesting ACTUALLY doing this; or that thinks its a GOOD IDEA to do this needs to have their head examined.
Magic the Gathering is Turing Complete. The fact that you don't write software in it doesn't change that. But it also doesn't make it a good idea.