Replacing desktop applications with large Javascript driven single pages
...is stupid.
For a very long time the only commonly used expression of software was the desktop application. Whether it was a console Linux thing or a full blown Windows application, it was something that you opened to get things done. In case you wanted to do several things, you either opted for a more complex application or used several of them, usually transferring partial work via the file system, sometimes in more obscure ways. For example you want to publish a photo album, you take all pictures you've taken, process them with an image processing software, then you save them and load them with a photo album application. For all intents and purposes, the applications are black boxes to each other, they only connect with inputs and outputs and need not know what goes on inside one another.
Enter the web and its novel concept of URLs, Uniform Resource Locators. In theory, everything on the web can be accessible from the outside. You want to link to a page, you have its URL to add as an anchor in your page and boom! A web site references specific resources from another. The development paradigm for these new things was completely different from big monolithic applications. Sites are called sites because they should be a place for resources to sit in; they are places, they have no other role. The resources, on the other hand, can be processed and handled by specific applications like browsers. If a browser is implemented in all operating systems in the same way, then the resources get accessed the same way, making the operating system - the most important part of one's software platform - meaningless. This gets us to this day and age when an OS is there to restrict what you can do, rather than provide you with features. But that's another story altogether.
With increased computing power, storage space, network speeds and the introduction and refining of Javascript - now considered a top contender for the most important programming language ever - we are now able to embed all kinds of crazy features in web pages, so much so that we have reached a time when writing a single page application is not only possible, but a norm. They had to add new functionality to browsers in order to let the page tweak the browser address without reloading the page and that is a big deal! And a really dumb one. Let me explain why.
The original concept was that the web would own the underlying mechanism of resource location. The new concept forces the developer to define what a resource locator means. I can pretty much make my own natural language processing system and have URLs that look like: https://siderite.com/give me that post ranting about the single page apps. And yes, the concept is not new, but the problem is that the implementation is owned by me. I can change it at any time and, since it all started from a desire to implement the newest fashion, destined to change. The result is chaos and that is presuming that the software developer thought of all contingencies and the URL system is adequate to link to resources from this page... which is never true. If the developer is responsible for interpreting what a URL means, then it is hardly "uniform".
Another thing that single page apps lead to is web site bloating. Not only do you have to load the stuff that now is on every popular website, like large pointless images and big fonts and large empty spaces, but also the underlying mechanism of the web app, which tells us where we are, what we can do, what gets loaded etc. And that's extra baggage that no one asked for. A single page app is hard to parse by a machine - and I don't care about SEO here, it's all about the way information is accessible.
My contention is that we are going backwards. We got the to point where connectivity is more important than functionality, where being on the web is more important than having complex well done features in a desktop app. It forced us to open up everything: resources, communication, protocols, even the development process and the code. And now we are going back to the "one app to rule them all" concept. And I do understand the attraction. How many times did I dream of adding mini games on my blog or make a 3D interface and a circular corner menu and so on. This things are cool! But they are only useful in the context of an existing web page that has value without them. Go to single page websites and try to open them with Javascript disabled. Google has a nice search page that works even then and you know what? The same page with Javascript is six times larger than the one without - and this without large differences in display. Yes, I know that this blog has a lot of stuff loaded with Javascript and that this page probably is much smaller without it, but the point it that the blog is still usable. For more on this you should take the time to read The Web Obesity Crisis, which is not only terribly true, but immensely funny.
And I also have to say I understand why some sites need to be single page applications, and that is because they are more application than web site. The functionality trumps the content. You can't have an online image processing app work without Javascript, that's insane. You don't need to reference the resource found in a color panel inside the photo editor, you don't need to link to the image used in the color picker and so on. But web sites like Flipboard, for example, that display a blank page when seen without Javascript, are supposed to be news aggregators. You go there to read stuff! It is true we can now decide how much of our page is a site and how much an application, but that doesn't mean we should construct abominations that are neither!
A while ago I wrote another ranty rant about how taking over another intuitively common web mechanism: scrolling, is helping no one. These two patterns are going hand in hand and slowly polluting the Internet. Last week Ars Technica announced a change in their design and at the same time implemented it. They removed the way news were read by many users: sequentially, one after the other, by scrolling down and clicking on the one you liked, and resorted to a magazine format where news were just side by side on a big white page with large design placeholders that looked cool yet did nothing but occupy space and display the number of comments for each. Content took a backseat to commentary. I am glad to report that two days later they reverted their decision, in view of the many negative comments.
I have nothing but respect for web designers, as I usually do for people that do things I am incapable of, however their role should always be to support the purpose of the site. Once things look cool just for the sake of it, you get Apple: a short lived bloom of user friendliness, followed by a vomitous explosion of marketing and pricing, leading to the immediate creation of cheaper clones. Copying a design because you think is great is normal, copying a bunch of designs because you have no idea what your web page is supposed to do is just direct proof you are clueless, and copying a design because everyone else is doing it is just blindly following clueless people.
My advice, as misguided as it could be, is forget about responsiveness and finger sized checkboxes, big images, crisp design and bootstrapped pages and all that crap. Just stop! And think! What are you trying to achieve? And then do it, as a web site, with pages, links and all that old fashioned logic. And if you still need cool design, add it after.
For a very long time the only commonly used expression of software was the desktop application. Whether it was a console Linux thing or a full blown Windows application, it was something that you opened to get things done. In case you wanted to do several things, you either opted for a more complex application or used several of them, usually transferring partial work via the file system, sometimes in more obscure ways. For example you want to publish a photo album, you take all pictures you've taken, process them with an image processing software, then you save them and load them with a photo album application. For all intents and purposes, the applications are black boxes to each other, they only connect with inputs and outputs and need not know what goes on inside one another.Enter the web and its novel concept of URLs, Uniform Resource Locators. In theory, everything on the web can be accessible from the outside. You want to link to a page, you have its URL to add as an anchor in your page and boom! A web site references specific resources from another. The development paradigm for these new things was completely different from big monolithic applications. Sites are called sites because they should be a place for resources to sit in; they are places, they have no other role. The resources, on the other hand, can be processed and handled by specific applications like browsers. If a browser is implemented in all operating systems in the same way, then the resources get accessed the same way, making the operating system - the most important part of one's software platform - meaningless. This gets us to this day and age when an OS is there to restrict what you can do, rather than provide you with features. But that's another story altogether.
With increased computing power, storage space, network speeds and the introduction and refining of Javascript - now considered a top contender for the most important programming language ever - we are now able to embed all kinds of crazy features in web pages, so much so that we have reached a time when writing a single page application is not only possible, but a norm. They had to add new functionality to browsers in order to let the page tweak the browser address without reloading the page and that is a big deal! And a really dumb one. Let me explain why.
The original concept was that the web would own the underlying mechanism of resource location. The new concept forces the developer to define what a resource locator means. I can pretty much make my own natural language processing system and have URLs that look like: https://siderite.com/give me that post ranting about the single page apps. And yes, the concept is not new, but the problem is that the implementation is owned by me. I can change it at any time and, since it all started from a desire to implement the newest fashion, destined to change. The result is chaos and that is presuming that the software developer thought of all contingencies and the URL system is adequate to link to resources from this page... which is never true. If the developer is responsible for interpreting what a URL means, then it is hardly "uniform".
Another thing that single page apps lead to is web site bloating. Not only do you have to load the stuff that now is on every popular website, like large pointless images and big fonts and large empty spaces, but also the underlying mechanism of the web app, which tells us where we are, what we can do, what gets loaded etc. And that's extra baggage that no one asked for. A single page app is hard to parse by a machine - and I don't care about SEO here, it's all about the way information is accessible.
My contention is that we are going backwards. We got the to point where connectivity is more important than functionality, where being on the web is more important than having complex well done features in a desktop app. It forced us to open up everything: resources, communication, protocols, even the development process and the code. And now we are going back to the "one app to rule them all" concept. And I do understand the attraction. How many times did I dream of adding mini games on my blog or make a 3D interface and a circular corner menu and so on. This things are cool! But they are only useful in the context of an existing web page that has value without them. Go to single page websites and try to open them with Javascript disabled. Google has a nice search page that works even then and you know what? The same page with Javascript is six times larger than the one without - and this without large differences in display. Yes, I know that this blog has a lot of stuff loaded with Javascript and that this page probably is much smaller without it, but the point it that the blog is still usable. For more on this you should take the time to read The Web Obesity Crisis, which is not only terribly true, but immensely funny.
And I also have to say I understand why some sites need to be single page applications, and that is because they are more application than web site. The functionality trumps the content. You can't have an online image processing app work without Javascript, that's insane. You don't need to reference the resource found in a color panel inside the photo editor, you don't need to link to the image used in the color picker and so on. But web sites like Flipboard, for example, that display a blank page when seen without Javascript, are supposed to be news aggregators. You go there to read stuff! It is true we can now decide how much of our page is a site and how much an application, but that doesn't mean we should construct abominations that are neither!
A while ago I wrote another ranty rant about how taking over another intuitively common web mechanism: scrolling, is helping no one. These two patterns are going hand in hand and slowly polluting the Internet. Last week Ars Technica announced a change in their design and at the same time implemented it. They removed the way news were read by many users: sequentially, one after the other, by scrolling down and clicking on the one you liked, and resorted to a magazine format where news were just side by side on a big white page with large design placeholders that looked cool yet did nothing but occupy space and display the number of comments for each. Content took a backseat to commentary. I am glad to report that two days later they reverted their decision, in view of the many negative comments.
I have nothing but respect for web designers, as I usually do for people that do things I am incapable of, however their role should always be to support the purpose of the site. Once things look cool just for the sake of it, you get Apple: a short lived bloom of user friendliness, followed by a vomitous explosion of marketing and pricing, leading to the immediate creation of cheaper clones. Copying a design because you think is great is normal, copying a bunch of designs because you have no idea what your web page is supposed to do is just direct proof you are clueless, and copying a design because everyone else is doing it is just blindly following clueless people.
My advice, as misguided as it could be, is forget about responsiveness and finger sized checkboxes, big images, crisp design and bootstrapped pages and all that crap. Just stop! And think! What are you trying to achieve? And then do it, as a web site, with pages, links and all that old fashioned logic. And if you still need cool design, add it after.
Comments
Be the first to post a comment