Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@freakazoid Regarding JS misuse... this ties into a number of other things, but that particular issue is actually almost entirely disconnected from the reason proprietary apps appeared on the web.

Over the years I've spent a lot of time understanding why there's so much JS misuse, and while there are various factors affecting it, there's been one central factor: developers are learning how to use the tools wrong.

There are very few 'known good' educational resources for web development, instead expecting people to cobble together their own learning experience.

The result is that a lot of developers - especially those who are getting into tech because "everyone should learn to code and it pays well" (as tech companies have been advertising to dilute the labour pool) - default to learning from tech companies, being the de facto authorities in the field from a beginner perspective.

These massive tech companies tend to put out breathless blogposts about whatever the newest "web at scale" hype is, because that's what *they* are doing and well, it's a good pitch to look like a modern place to work. The appeal of "not having to deal with legacy stuff" is large, especially for beginner devs.

So in practice, almost everybody either learns from resources by big tech companies - which optimize for hype and looking 'ahead of the curve', as well as 'training developers to work with their stack for cheaper hiring - or from resources which have been *derived from* those big tech resources.

MDN technically exists, but as I've complained about many times before, their materials are so inaccessible in many ways that almost nobody I've pointed at it has actually been interested in reading it.

There's now a massive amount of developers whose whole conception of "web development" consists almost exclusively of this hype blog output, often legitimately not *knowing* about any other way to do it.

(I have had to explain how forms without JS work *so many* times by now, to people who have been doing webdev for years...)

For obvious reasons, none of the tech companies really have any reason to do anything about this problem.

TL;DR: There's a massive education problem that is self-sustaining by this point because those people then write new materials with the same errors in them. And they will take these beliefs with them to any new platform.

(Aside, Flash used to be Macromedia; Shockwave was another product of theirs.)

I am likewise concerned by the situation with WASM, and I'm seeing a very similar albeit disconnected situation playing out there; a lot of people who have only ever learned a really specific (terrible) way of writing JS see it as a way to "get rid of JS because it sucks", and it's *extremely* difficult IME to convey that JS can be a lot better if you change the way you approach it. But this again has a bunch of other factors influencing it too (spec scope creep, etc.)

Overall, all of these situations are just extremely messy, and a variety of factors have played a role in getting to this point, and none of those factors can just be wished away, unfortunately. Capitalist incentives, hype cycles, self-perpetuating education problems... no new platform will fix any of these, we're actually going to have to do the Hard Work

@freakazoid "It's become a platform for delivering shitty proprietary apps. We need something else entirely."

This, to me, is a primitivist argument. Maybe not literally, but it makes the same error of writing off the outcome without considering the factors that led up to it.

*Why* did it become that? What problem is this solving for people? The technology hasn't changed that much - so why is it mostly shitty proprietary apps now? Because those are the apps that people are trying to use, for some reason or another that has nothing to do with "the web" as a concept or technology.

Sure, you can discard the web and start over. The outcome of that is going to be that the things people are trying to use - the "shitty proprietary apps" stay behind on the web, and people will continue using the web, and your new thing will be ignored because it doesn't have the things people are looking for.

You can't just throw everything out and start over. If you want to make something that is actually broadly useful to replace the existing thing, it needs to meet the same needs as the existing thing; and right now that includes the proprietary apps, however much that sucks.

Doesn't mean you can't make life harder for those proprietary apps, and it doesn't mean you can't fight against them on some other axis, but "building a web without them" will not work in any way that matters.

@freakazoid I think there are a couple of reasoning errors in there, to be honest. Going one by one:

"But my real point is that I don't think the problem of Google's dominance over the Internet can be solved by another browser if that browser's goals are substantially the same as Firefox's, if that makes any sense."

It can't, but that's also not the goal - there *is* no instant solution to Google's dominance. The purpose of such a project would be to weaken Google's grip on the web, to remove a major point of control. More work is needed beyond that point to actually get rid of Google, it's just a destabilizer.

"You end up having to play constant catch-up, either because you're having to keep changing your own rendering engine or because you have to keep incorporating upstream changes into the one you're built on."

Yes and no. This is true as long as you are the underdog. "Maintaining compatibility until you can afford not to" is a strategy that works for monopolists, but it also works for those trying to dethrone them. Notably, diverse community projects are generally better at keeping up with such complexity than centralized organizations are; this is a point we have an advantage on.

"And if Mozilla can't manage more than a miniscule market share even with its millions in revenue, how is another browser?"

This is is a very complex question to answer in full, but the short answer boils down to: Mozilla is not representative of all that exists, let alone all that can exist.

They are a singular organization, born from unique circumstances, with a single decisionmaking hierarchy, and a particular style of management. There is no reason to believe that *any* of their outcomes are automatically applicable to anyone else.

The argument here is effectively "if this one group of people couldn't do it, how could anyone else?" and that is just not how feasibility assessment works - what matters is *why* it is not working for Mozilla, and that starts with their poor management structure.

"I just think another browser can't have enough impact in the current world to be worth the huge effort it would take."

That's the thing, for me - *is* it actually a huge effort? For any one person, yes, certainly. But compared to all the potential things that the community could be doing, in total, with good collaboration structures, I don't actually think it's that significant.

It shouldn't happen *at the cost of* other, more effective approaches, but given the large amount of people looking for community and purpose, I'd say we have a very long way to go before that becomes a concern.

And ultimately, volunteer labour is not interchangeable. Usually the alternative to "doing X" is "not doing anything at all", because those same volunteers might not actually have any interest at all in the alternative to X being proposed.

@freakazoid I would personally feel it very unwise to rely on a government - *especially* the US government - for the continued existence of the web.

I don't think we can afford to do so, in fact, and like with everything progressive, a government isn't going to do it until the relevant pressure from *outside* the government builds up. Like by building something, for instance.

@elilla Ah. Probably not that then :(

@elilla (That was something they told me when I had phantom moisture sensor alarms on my own dishwasher)

@elilla Dishwasher tech here informed me that the moisture sensor can sometimes cause false positives after it has gotten wet for some reason or another (even if a temporary blockage), and to tilt the machine backwards to dislodge any 'stuck' water and let it dry for 24 hours, and see if it still complains.

@freakazoid That's the thing, though, there are projects that I would *like* to work on, but that aren't really realistic to get started on unless I have someone to bounce ideas off.