

Welcome to the new web. - dkulchenko
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2011-November/033914.html

======
gbog
I agree with the claim in this forum post. It is annoying to have all pages
javascript generated, clicks hijacked to make some special sauce, and content
popping in, up, down or out whenever you hover something. It is a growing mess
that will have it "let's rollback and clean this crap out" time, like Google
did with its famous blank home page.

Another example: trello.com is a very nice and free card tool for small
projects, but because they wanted to avoid having an "edit" button on editable
text, they hijack my clicks, so it makes it painful to select text, and quite
impossible to use "middle-click as paste".

But, there is a more positive perspective liked to Google+. In fact, I think
the midterm result of Google entering in the SNS arena could (and should) be
to force open Facebook. I mean, right now G+ is not open, it doesn't have all
the needed APIs, and this is probably OK because they they need a critical
mass before opening, and one should not bash them for testing, pondering,
adjusting a bit more before releasing some important changes. Time is on their
side anyway.

But in the end, they will go, I hope, the full good-old Google way, which
means:

\- Read/write APIs for posts, followers, followees, etc.

\- Ability to dump all data and go away

\- RSS or similar subscribing hooks

These tools will allow a much higher interoperability for social content,
similar to interoperability of emails today. Users will not really care if the
comments on their baby pics are written using Facebook, G+ or any other Social
Content Manager, they will read and respond to them in the SNS of their
choice, like we do today with emails. (I wrote a bit more ion this topic
there:
[https://plus.google.com/104035200377885758362/posts/A9r7twSD...](https://plus.google.com/104035200377885758362/posts/A9r7twSD5Yh))

~~~
bad_user
You're an optimist.

I'm a pessimist - Google+ is too little, too late. Facebook is already too big
to fail, Google+ being here the equivalent of Microsoft's Bing.

Facebook won't open up. They don't have than in their DNA, their biggest asset
is their huge audience and they'll do anything they can to keep that audience
on Facebook -- opening up their platform in a way that benefits competitors
simply makes no sense.

The Internet as we know it is indeed dying.

~~~
beza1e1
There is no "too big to fail". There was a little financial incident in a
small north american country some time ago, where some "too big to fail"
institutions failed. I've already heared some teens don't like Facebook
anymore because mom and dad are also there.

What changes is the web framework style. Asynchronous page loading provides a
smoother experience compared to refreshing the whole page. Gmail and
Thunderbird will be increasingly similar. Just that one is in a sandbox called
browser and the other's sandbox is called operation system.

~~~
bad_user
Indeed, there is no such thing as _too big to fail_ , however you can say of
certain companies that they are _too big to fail easily_. Facebook was once
small and fragile. Not anymore.

    
    
         What changes is the web framework style
    

The changes are a lot deeper than that. The web is increasingly against
sharing, against cooperation, against standards.

The _semantic web_ dream is dying, replaced by web versions of Microsoft
Exchange.

~~~
gbog
> web versions of Microsoft Exchange.

What a nightmare! Hey guys, we are we so pessimistic these times? We should
fight instead.

\- Facebook is annoying but you want to keep in touch? Use one of the many
tools allowing you to receive your fiends baby pics without opening Facebook.
If no tool suits you, hack another one! (I would love a command line fb, by
the way)

\- Tired of shitty web apps that lost the pure HTTP way and mess with click
events? Find or hack an extension that shut them down. If too badly bad, pull
on the black hat and make a fuck of that.

\- Lack of inspiration? Read again pg's essays, it fuels one with renewed
inspiration.

~~~
icebraining
I don't think the problem most people have with Facebook is the interface, but
the lack of control over your personal data.

------
tgrass
As I write this there are two comments that have been downvoted to the bottom
for expressing how difficult the post is to read. They draw attention to the
post's textual interface, albeit perhaps sarcastically ("Is the new web better
at UX than this? That was painful to look at.").

Not only is theirs a serious concern, but it speaks to the main issue of the
post, for it reminds us that like web interfaces, even text has accreted
arbitrary rules to interpret it. Take the apostrophe for example, it is for
most purposes superflous as one can tell from context whether a word is
plural, possessive or a contraction. Well, I can tell the difference, cant
you?

The original post is saturated with consistent, but by no means universal and
certainly not empirically-derived, pre-conceived rules for communicating
textual content: the date posted is in italics; the site name is bracketed and
bold; the post name is bold; links which serve a sorting function are colored,
underlined and bracketed; a presumably copied email prefaces the actual post
in italics with each line itself prefaced with a less-than-sign; and most
importantly much of the post is composed of incomplete sentences ("A web
where...").

We allow ourselves to bend the rules of grammar. And as we bend them, we adapt
to the new general rule.

We are all familiar with the english teacher's common correction of a
misplaced object: "It's 'He and I went to the store', not 'Me and him went to
the store'". This "rule" has been so often repeated, that most days I hear
college-educated individuals perform the inverse, substituting the nominative
for the objective case, as in "Bob critiqued the web page with Jack and I."
What is interesting to me is apparently the act of replacing the nominative
with the objective also occured in the Latin language around 200 AD (and it's
a common act in children). So, if we create our rules for grammar empirically
and not not arbitrarily, we can look at saying "Me and Jack did something" as
acceptable because it has a natural precedent.

Which is all just to say that communication as a web form or in paragraphs is
subjective and organic. Differences in type should be no more surprising than
differences in human ethnicity.

~~~
quotemstr
Perhaps not coincidentally, 200 AD was about the time that Rome started to
falter: in 235, the "Crisis of the Third Century" permanently wrecked trade,
knowledge, and culture. The crisis marked the real beginning of the medieval
period, and 476 was too late to do anything about it.

~~~
tgrass
Tis true. And if not merely coincidence, it leaves us our choice of
interpretation: was it cause or consequence.

------
tambourine_man
Listen to this guy. Nils Dagsson Moskopp, what a great post.

We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book and
a blog.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book
> and a blog."_

How typically computer-geek of you. Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-
use systems and have abandoned them for products that are easier to use and
appeal more to their perception of how technology should work!

How dare they! The plebes! DO NOT THEY NOT KNOW WHAT THEY DO?!

Why won't people _do more work_ to preserve the freedom of the web, like
setting up their own blogs, and manually maintaining their own contacts?!

~~~
bad_user
That's because of a lack of education, because we, the technically inclined
people, have failed to serve the normal people, preferring instead to:

1) reinvent the wheel over and over, each time with a new interface, shinier
and more limited than the one before it

2) cater more to our hypothetical grandmas instead of our children ... which
ironically are able to write HTML in Notepad just fine, if taught how to do
that

    
    
         Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use 
         systems and have abandoned them for products 
         that are easier to use
    

What you're missing here is that those products _that are easier to use_ get
replaced like socks, with the users being back on square 1 every single time
and struggling to perform even the most basic tasks by clicking their way
around.

People all over Europe have learned to drive cars with manual transmissions -
because after the initial pain, the vegetative nervous system kicks in and the
wheel, the pedals, the gear switch, all of them become a natural extension, of
which you don't think about anymore, _just like breathing_. And if automatic
transmissions are great too, that's because they stay out of your way.

The UI of modern software is nothing like that. Nothing is logical anymore,
nothing is designed anymore to be an extension of you. Normal users have to
think about their every action, they have to visually search for clues in the
UI for every stupid thing they do, they have to rote learn the paths they have
to take for the software to take them from some point A, to some other point
B. I saw users that have notes on the actual clicks they have to make for
certain common actions. I don't know about you, but to me this is freaking
painful to watch ;)

Btw, for some good user-experience guidelines, check out The Design of
Everyday Things: <http://amzn.to/ryfiuI> (the link does contain my affiliate
code) ... the one thing I took away from this book is that _simplicity_ is a
complex topic.

    
    
         Why won't people do more work ... 
         setting up their own blogs
    

Setting up your own blog is just a few clicks away on Google's Blogger, on
Wordpress.com, on Tumblr.com or on countless other services. It takes more
work to set up a template that represents your style, but that's not something
you can do on Facebook anyway.

Really, step down from your high horse, it's not like you yourself are not
guilty for the current state of our industry. We all are.

~~~
ColdAsIce
"People all over Europe have learned to drive cars with manual transmissions -
because after the initial pain, the vegetative nervous system kicks in and the
wheel, the pedals, the gear switch, all of them become a natural extension, of
which you don't think about anymore, just like breathing. And if automatic
transmissions are great too, that's because they stay out of your way."

This is how it is, every time a user gets familiar with _concepts_ of his/her
user interface, such as a minimize button, a window, a taskbar, it is "re-
invented" and changed. No longer is there a minimize button in latest Ubuntu,
the taskbar is no longer a taskbar its some weird form of activity with
grouping bar in Windows 7.

All the concepts of the user interface such as buttons and scrollbars are
exchanged, the basis of what a user _interfaces_ with, is changed. A great
suprise then when a user has to relearn everything and gain new concepts just
to use a new tool or web a new website. Many just dont go down that way and
stick it out with facebook as "the internet".

Tip for UI designers: Stop designing, stop your user-interfacing design, there
is one already which the user knows. Focus on _your_ data and fit it into the
old and tried concepts of buttons that look like buttons and have only one
function, not also state "button is staying pressed in", thats a checkbox.
Darn it.

~~~
alexhawket
Unfortunately it's not possible to "stop" designing web UI as there is no
standarzied ui library in html/css. Web apps have been shoehorned into a
system that was never intended to behave like an app.

Stopping random UI experiments would require a replacement system designed
specifically for web apps that access a standard library of controls.

~~~
bergie
We've been using Twitter's Bootstrap in quite a lot of our recent web app
projects. It provides a reasonable "standard widget set":
<http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/>

~~~
alexhawket
Yeah there's lots of great UI libraries but it doesn't really solve the
problem since they aren't universally applied.

Users still have to learn the UI controls of each library or whatever else the
designers come up with.

------
16s
It's ironic that ten years ago many people (average consumers) thought that
AOL was the Internet. Now they think Facebook and Google are. Ten years from
now, it'll be something else and HN type people will still be doing their own
thing as usual.

~~~
sjs
Is our thing complaining about the popular things from the lesser travelled
discussion forums? Snickering about how the masses don't know Facebook from
the web from the Internet. "The fools!"

That's obviously tongue in cheek but there's some truth to it. At the end of
the day does it really matter if people are happy using the one thing on their
computer that they can actually use and understand?

------
pgroves
As much as I wish the innovations of g+ and Facebook were centered around RSS
and email, this is just the way new technologies evolve. Identity management
and permissions management for who can see a user's content just don't have a
good standard yet. Therefore private companies are rolling their own
proprietary solutions and competing with each other.

At some point, the standard techniques for dealing with these issues will
become Standards. This is a well worn path. Html was a standardization of the
previous 10 years of work on markup languages, plenty of them proprietary.
There are other examples... ODF standardizing on XML and cloning established
MS Office functionality... etc.

Real Standards that could address the article's concerns are only reasonable
when NO innovation is necessary, merely choosing a methodology that has
already been built and proven to work in practice. IMO, Java more or less
committed suicide when it started a standards-first innovation process, which
resulted in many multi-year projects doing design-by-committee of an api
before anyone tried to build an implementation or an actual product on top of
it.

As long as G+ is introducing features not available elsewhere, the fact that
it's a currently closed system just isn't a reasonable criticism.

~~~
bad_user
Out of curiosity, what features does G+ have that aren't available elsewhere.

------
zdw
Sounds just like the old web, if you were blind and went to a Flash fullscreen
website.

As much as I like the ways that sites like G+ are trying to push the envelope,
if you're handling data that was created by or belongs to others it's more
important to fit into the greater data ecosystem than to stand out...

------
ms123
To me the difference between "old-web" and "new-web" is a lot like the one
between "program" and "application.

Old-web was just text and markup. A lot like the output of command line
programs that could then be used by other programs to perform what we want.

New-web is about application. Programs made for the end-user. Apps aren't
thought to be pipelined with other apps. Thus for a web-app, the browser is
often designed to be the only supported plateform. Thus the extensive use of
JS.

~~~
ColdAsIce
Straw man, text and markup was made for the end-user as well.

~~~
ms123
my point is that programs can be pipelined, not applications.

~~~
ColdAsIce
an application is a program. you're thinking of commands, which are a subset
of programs

------
nbpoole
> _A web you cannot easily read without JavaScript because somewhere in the
> page header there is a „ <style> body { visibility: hidden; } </style>”
> later getting unset by a script that the platform owners want you to run._

To be fair to Google, that sounds like a fairly standard clickjacking
prevention mechanism. It's necessary to provide protection to browsers that
don't support X-Frame-Options.

------
lowglow
The only power the "new web" has is the power we give it.

~~~
ericd
It's not us geeks that will decide this. It's people who never understood the
things he's talking about, and therefore won't miss them much. The things he's
talking about are all more complicated than the thugs replacing them for the
common use case (though it makes many more complex things impossible), which
makes this somewhat inevitable.

Tools will come out to ameliorate the problems with the new order of things.
That things are controlled by a handful of entities is much more worrying,
though.

------
sxtxixtxcxh
i remember the old web, a web without RSS or ATOM feeds.

~~~
jsilence
Yeah. Gopher and Archie. And you would 'talk' with someone. People had shell
accounts.

Good thing is: No one is keeping you from giving a CPR to Fidonet. Redundancy
gives resilience.

------
earnubs
We need a better, open, ways of connecting people on the 'old' web.

------
ma2rten
In the grant scheme of thing, do people really think it is a big deal if a
page shows you a 404 error, even if the content you are looking for actually
exists? I think it's very tempting to get lost in tiny details like that.

~~~
jsilence
It might appear to some like a tiny detail, but things like this break the
web. HTTP status codes are there for a good reason. A similar situation is
when your provider redirects you to its own search page instead of giving you
the 404.

------
steilpass
So what are we going to do about it? There must be a business opportunity
here.

~~~
jsilence
I really don't get it, why the dying social networks like Myspace, Friendster,
StudieVZ et.al. are not embracing the distributed social protocols like crazy.

OAuth, Salmon, PubSubHubbub, FOAF, ... everything is right there.

------
zalew
it's a bit sad that in the most decentralized media, people tend to stick to
the most centralized utilities to communicate with each other (I use them
too). but:

> With less sarcasm: What use is this if one already reads the blog?

none. if you don't want to use it - don't. move on.

giving users another subscription channel is not a problem. a problem appears
when someone uses these closed platforms as their _only_ communication
channel, f.ex. it's impossible to move a fanpage with it's community out of
facebook. when people and organization treat it just as another feed broadcast
(as whatwg did), everything is fine.

------
nomdeplume
I feel your pain; and wrote about it:
[http://danielmillsap.com/blog/culture/cultural-artifacts-
in-...](http://danielmillsap.com/blog/culture/cultural-artifacts-in-an-
impermanent-digital-world/)

------
zqfm
And don't forget: "This content not authorized for mobile devices."

------
harrylove
The correct response to hyperbole is always, "We'll see."

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbsx_vZTcNI>

------
hm2k
Google tried it the other way via Google Wave and unfortunately nobody bought
into it.

~~~
sylvinus
Regarding the rendering technologies it was exactly the same, a big pile of JS
that you need to render actual content.

The main point of the author seems to be that G+ doesn't use progressive
enhancement.

------
nirvana
I'm a member of a forum for graduates of one of the schools I went to. In 2007
it was a vibrant and active forum, growing steadily, and straining its hosting
account, which constantly had to be expanded.

At some point, around 2009, most of the members of this forum got Facebook
accounts. That forum is now completely dead.

Facebook took all the oxygen out of the site, and it seems like a lot of other
sites.

Now very mainstream people seem to think of Facebook as "the internet" and
they just hang out there. Some of the bigger sites are doing ok, still, of
course.

But at least for that forum, its audience is gone.

To a person, the members of the audience say they love it, and many of them
say they hate facebook because "its so impersonal." On the forum they were
able to share more private things with closer friends.

I think they would rather hang out on the forum, but there isn't the critical
mass anymore... simply because Facebook is more addictive.

It has gotten into some sort of a gamification, or addiction loop, in these
peoples heads, it seems.

I think the web is going to undergo a radical change in the next 5 or so
years.

~~~
dissident
As an administrator of an online message board, I concur. Web content is being
so efficiently aggregated that some forums turn into the awkward conversation
between two redditors: "Check this out!" "Heh, yeah. I saw that."

Communities before were usually separated by _platforms_ , because the
platforms were not yet sophisticated enough to support vast communities of
varying opinions. Now we have a few big players that can do this and more.
Social media has turned into a war over who can blow the most filter bubbles,
and with services like OpenID and "connect with facebook", everything has
slowly become part of the same identity.

I'm hoping that a new platform will eventually come along to pry this apart,
but it's going to take a completely different paradigm to cause it. Unless
something like Google+ proves otherwise, websites like Facebook and Twitter et
al have the potential to monopolize social networking.

~~~
tfb
I hope you don't mind a shameless plug, but I believe something like my
startup might be this new platform of which you speak: <http://loggur.com>.

I'm not claiming that my startup in particular will be it, but something like
it. Just saying this probably puts me in the category of "just another young
whipper snapper who aspires to be the next Zuck"... but I have no desire to do
anything like Facebook or Google or intentionally copy any particular model. I
just want to do what works (well).

Loggur is clearly an infant at this point and I'm sure the initial impression
given by its current presentation of the idea doesn't exactly scream
"innovation" or "the next big thing"... but bear with me. I'm starting off
relatively simple and will iterate as I get feedback (as is expected of any
startup) but the general end result, as I envision it, will essentially be an
extremely wide variety of user-editable tools specific to each user and/or
community, from communication to productivity and automation - or both. I
realize that the current presentation is pretty vague, but that will change
after iteration and solid examples. The current descriptions are based on an
alpha version which I put together earlier this year to prove the concept.

~~~
hmigneron
The concept of loggur seems interesting, but to be completely honest, I
thought the "help us get featured on" written in small characters before the
logos of TechCrunch, Mashable, etc. was deceiving in a really lame way.

~~~
tfb
I've seen other startups on HN do the same thing and received positive
responses for doing so, which is why I did it. It seems to be a matter of
perspective, I guess. As per your response, I'll make the "Help us get
featured on" text larger. My intention isn't to be deceiving or lame. I just
hope to someday be able to remove that text.

------
zobzu
this was quite insighful actually.

------
ChrisArchitect
daark. I get the uncertainty and fear of the 'seedy' nature of G+ and rise of
the corporate platforms...but seems like more of us trying things out,
learning, so we can maybe direct change/influence the evolution of the
platforms....

------
evertonfuller
Someone call the UX police. Cannot read that. Looks like it got lost from
1995.

~~~
user24
> Cannot read that

it's called 'text'. You've heard of 'words', yeah? Well text is just a
collection of words - think of it like a photo album or playlist, but for
words. We call them paragraphs.

The great thing about paragraphs is that you can group a whole bunch of words
together to form more powerful concepts than the individual words themselves.

Paragraphs have a very simple UI - in fact you're using one right now!

------
wmeredith
Is the new web better at UX than this? That was painful to look at.

------
Gigablah
And apparently the old web is filled with sarcasm and spite.

