The Neverending Story
The article highlights that corporate attempts to dominate web technologies often fail, while collaboration on web standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript ensures accessibility and long-term success over proprietary solutions.
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The article discusses the historical attempts by corporations to dominate web technologies through proprietary platforms and frameworks, such as Applets, ActiveX, Flash, and React. It argues that while these innovations aimed for speed and advanced capabilities, they often failed to enhance the web in a meaningful way. Instead, the enduring success of web standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is attributed to collaboration and compromise among stakeholders. The author emphasizes that the slow evolution of web standards is beneficial, allowing for careful consideration and broad accessibility. Corporate-driven technologies, while interesting, tend to create complications and dependencies that hinder long-term success. The piece concludes that the future of the web will not be dictated by corporate interests but will continue to evolve through shared standards that prioritize collective benefit over individual ownership.
- Corporate attempts to dominate web technologies often fail to improve the web.
- Web standards thrive on collaboration and compromise, not speed.
- The slow evolution of web standards allows for careful consideration and accessibility.
- Proprietary technologies can create complications that hinder long-term success.
- The future of the web will be shaped by shared standards rather than corporate interests.
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6 comments- Web standards didn't move fast enough for developers and users. People _wanted_ things like games, streaming videos and online shopping, which were impossible to do properly with web standard technologies for much of the 90s and 2000s. This wasn't driven by "big corporations" and Macromedia was never a big corporation anyway.
- How have React, or Angular for that matter, "failed"? How are they things not to bet a career on? React remains the default choice for most web app development as it has been for over a decade now. And I still see plenty of Angular jobs, far more than are looking for web components, the supposed standardised alternative.
- Web standards are _not_ decentralised in any way, shape or form. They are organised through a handful of centralised organisations, mainly the W3C, which are controlled by their major funders. Who are, surprise surprise, large corporations. Yes, the are somewhat open to outside participation, but it still is browser vendor employees who do most of the key work and make the key decisions, with Google/Chrome being the dominant player.
- Many, if not most, web standard technologies are invented by small numbers of engineers working for large corporations with no different incentives than those working on the technologies the author disparages. Canvas and CSS animations were created by Apple. Web components were created by Google. They were then adopted and standardised by other corporate employees.
- What "churn" have React and Angular really suffered? React was released in 2013 and has seen only one really major change — Hooks — in that time. Otherwise it has been a remarkably stable base to build software on. Most of the "churn" has actually occurred at the _community_ level, through the rise and fall of various open-source tools and libraries.
- The progress of web standards has not been the consistently slow but irresistible tide the author claims. Progress in the late 90s and 2000s was essentially nonexistent, being held back by Microsoft/IE's lack of interest and then the huge mass of users stuck on outdated browser versions. Then, once evergreen browsers reached a critical mass, progress sped up enormously, and in the modern era it easily outpaces the supposed churn of frameworks like React and Angular.
That hit home :-) Great quote
Flash was surreal in how good it was: a fantastic editor, language, and format for building and distributing hermetically encapsulated containers of multimedia greatness.
We need another Flash. It was S-tier and too good for us.
2. This point is extremely funny:
"Every single programming language and framework in the world is the result of someone or some corporation believing they can do better."
... as we're looking at web which is literally a badly-designed and ill-fitting mish-mash of things someone (and in recent years increasingly one single corporation) decided they can do better
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