
The Case Against Progressive Enhancement's Flimsy Moral Foundation - kingkool68
https://www.viget.com/articles/the-case-against-progressive-enhancements-flimsy-moral-foundation
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detaro
IMHO the article throws a lot of potential away by insisting that its
opponents are unwavering extremists. They are extremely likely not, which
quickly sends the argumentative house of cards falling down. Just because you
found a short soundbyte does not mean the speaker sees it as dogma that is
applicable in all cases, disclaimers about that just make for bad keynote
talks.

Looking at the "unstated assumptions" behind arguments is interesting, but the
article mostly does it to ridicule, not to actually engage with them.

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enkiv2
This article lays out an argument that's clearly intended to be a strawman,
but that I find completely reasonable. (Some elements are clearly exaggerated:
there's a difference between a website "not working in Sudan" and a website
not working on five year old hardware, and modern maximalist websites often
don't work properly on the kind of slightly out-of-date hardware that most
real users have.)

There's another take on this: that, while the web is being used to implement
desktop-application-like behaviors and distribute drm-protected content, web
technologies are incredibly ill-suited to performing pretty much every task
outside of the display of small static pages, and that every attempt to force
the web to perform this kind of trick is the admittedly impressive result of a
pile of ugly hacks that waste enormous amounts of resources -- whereas
performing these tasks using technologies actually suited to them would be
simpler for everyone involved and make this content accessible to people using
less powerful hardware or with lower-bandwidth connections. I don't think
anyone who has worked both with web technologies & with building native
applications can seriously disagree with the idea that using web technologies
to perform native application tasks requires a pile of ugly hacks, and I don't
think anyone who has used older hardware to access newer sites can seriously
deny that this kind of over-reach produces systems that are unusable without
expensive new equipment. (We can also make the argument that, because
advertising is neither the only revenue model for web-driven content nor the
best by any measure, there's little sense in trying to support the huge and
mostly crooked ad ecosystem when we can easily avoid it entirely.)

It used to be that people didn't associate the internet solely with the web,
and that if people needed to use ssh, they'd use ssh; if they needed to use
ftp or gopher, they'd use ftp or gopher. The web later became a catch-all
protocol, and people started developing big complicated wrappers to make
existing software work via a web browser while simultaneously various
organizations started setting up their internal firewalls to whitelist only
port 80. This is a mistake: the web was never designed to replace all of
computing, and will never be able to do so in an acceptable manner. We should
be taking the huge variety of the software ecosystem back, instead of trying
to force everything into web tech and ignoring everything that doesn't fit.

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wmf
Basically Windows XP doesn't have an app store so Web apps beat native apps
even given the huge technology handicap.

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enkiv2
App stores are kind of nonsense, and I don't see how they are relevant. People
install all sorts of software. Windows users have to go find a proper web
browser and install it in order to use "modern" sites. Rather than having
giant bloated web browsers that need to be found and installed by end users,
why not have web browsers that just do web browsing and are a couple hundred
kilobytes in size, and then let people decide whether or not they want to
bother installing the rest of the nonsense?

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pshc
Check out the counterargument by adrianroselli in the comments.

