Is HTML good?

Is HTML good?

>That's a very vague question.
Feel free to interpret it however you want to.

html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage

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Yes.

jesus christ fix your font rendering you mongrel

>liking blurry font

>font
*text

>Without CSS
Simple, bad and ugly

>With CSS
Gnarled, hacky and presentable

HTML is fine for what it is, but it seems like an annoying halfway-house that has none of the benefits of a full document system like postscript, but not even the simplicity of plain text.

It seems like it doesn't do what it's meant to do, and what it's meant to do isn't very good.

I like it.
If there's some document I want to read and I can choose between pdf or html, I'll always take html unless I want to print it. On screen html has a much nicer and more flexible layout.
Most documents are published in pdf only unfortunately.

HTML/CSS/Javascript were created for a much simpler web and are now very bad for what the web has become, enabling basically a feeble card pyramid system of framework on top of framework clusterfuck and going through loads of preprocessing to turn your coffeescript and haml and shit back into HTML/CSS/Javascript. It's pretty much a giant hack.

Web should be remade from scratch.

But it will never happen.

Isn't that the fault of inconsistent browsers rather than the fault of HTML?

Pretty much. HTML doesn't really have any "look".

Sadly rendering HTML in a pleasing manner has long-since stopped being an objective of web browsers.

>HTML doesn't really have any "look".
But the HTML Standard has a whole section on how default rendering should work: html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/rendering.html#rendering

For its intended purpose — describing text documents?

...Not really.

For what it's used today, which are highly interactive dynamic applications?
FUCK.
NO.

Unfortunately, the WWW can never get away from it.

I hope a new patform/protocol/whatever comes about at least one more time. I'm getting so bored of "old but bigger".

As much as I'd like that... It's very, very unlikely.

Just think of Unix.
It wasn't perfect. Not at all. Even its creators saw that, as they considered it the emasculated version of the product they actually wanted to build.

But it was good enough,good enough to gain a significant market share. And now, 50 years later, we still basically use the same shit, just polished up and with lots of features added.

It won't ever get replaced.
The only other System that has a significant influence is Windows, and that's not changed that much either since being a GUI and "multitasking" layer for DOS.

The only way to introduce something new today is to provide a compatibility layer for existing systems, but then the industry will just keep using the old standard because it's compatible with both.

TL;DR: As soon as sufficiently good system is created, it's extremely unlikely to be replaced.

The problem is that things have also gotten too complex.

>The problem is that things have also gotten too complex.
Flexibility breeds complexity.
All those WIBNIs add up.

HTML is perfect
It is the CSS and JS that ruins it

It's the browsers that ruin it. I literally have to use a normalize.css file so all browsers have the same look. I literally have to style the buttons so they have the same height everywhere. I hate doing that but sometimes I need to do the front-end work.

I could never imagine doing that as my job through. CSS would make me insane, it's such a hacking without any logic I can't believe it.

You're just too dumb to use CSS and JS.

HTML, CSS and JS are great.
The problem at hand is all the shitty browsers who didn't bother to follow the spec but instead decided to make stupid custom crap that means you have to prefix pointless garbage on every piece of styling, etc.

Just go full-blown brave new world monopoly on it already, merge together the good bits from all browsers. I don't care, I just want all this straying away from the spec to fuck off.

I have what I think is a pretty good idea for replacing the current ecosystem with something better-designed, more secure, and easier for people to get started with. The issue is that this idea is really a family of ideas splitting out various types of online content into different specialized but still flexible systems. You could imagine the system for documents being something like a modernized gopher while storefronts would be different but related system focusing on providing for the needs of storefronts.
Ultimately I'd want to let there be as many microbrowsers for each of these different systems as there needs to be. Each one specialized for their needs with a unifying shell layer providing an experience similar to a modern web browser to the user. This shell would also provide for what are currently webapps but could actually be their own applications that are managed by browser for install/updates ideally. They could even be their own microbrowser just like every other content type.

With specialized browsers for various content types, the files that are served could be a lot simpler which is a huge plus imo. You wouldn't need random sites running code on your computer because the behavior of sites is instead baked in to the browsers.

It's not an idea that's going to gain any traction without a huge amount of development. Hopefully this summary makes sense, I have initial drafts of design docs I'm working on but typing up this sort of thing on mobile sucks.

It does what it's supposed to and beyond, so for me at least, it's not... Webgl canvas is all irrelevant bloat

I get what you mean, but like you said, it will never happen despite it making so much sense for as you say news article sites to just function on a level similar to Gopher.