> The web was designed to deliver pages, this was well designed
It was well designed, using Hypermedia. Which works extremely well for hyperlinks and forms.
Instead of leveraging and improving these primitives, corporates¹ and web-devs threw it all out and re-invented it. Multiple times².
¹ The worst offenders obviously being those that have held back web-apps just so they can extract more money from native apps. i.e. Apple.
² jQuery, then Angular et. al. Then react. Now WASM. In which we throw all all the REST concepts and push a mongrel data format, JSON, over the web. When we had XML with strong typing, meaning, hypermedia, permissions, etc. We have - by now- reinvented all these on top of JSON, but worse and poorer.
And, finally we are full circle back to HTMX. How often will web-devs keep re-inventing wheels? Why can't we see that problems have been solved since early '00s and that improving these is also possible?
It was well designed, using Hypermedia. Which works extremely well for hyperlinks and forms. Instead of leveraging and improving these primitives, corporates¹ and web-devs threw it all out and re-invented it. Multiple times².
¹ The worst offenders obviously being those that have held back web-apps just so they can extract more money from native apps. i.e. Apple.
² jQuery, then Angular et. al. Then react. Now WASM. In which we throw all all the REST concepts and push a mongrel data format, JSON, over the web. When we had XML with strong typing, meaning, hypermedia, permissions, etc. We have - by now- reinvented all these on top of JSON, but worse and poorer. And, finally we are full circle back to HTMX. How often will web-devs keep re-inventing wheels? Why can't we see that problems have been solved since early '00s and that improving these is also possible?