Electron Apps Are Bad, So Now You Can Create Desktop Apps With HTML5 + Golang

[starshipeleven]

HTML is starting to grow into something nice, for what it is, but the problem is how it is used. I mean, the vast majority of HTML pages are static, but still uses dynamic interpreters so that the same calculations are performed over and over, often hundreds of millions of times. That's the insanity of how we use technology.

If web developers had to pay CO2 taxes on the abuse of client-side resources, I think things would improve just as quickly as they have on the server-side. But in reality, there's no penalty for being stupid on the client-side, because it's the client who pays for it and the client doesn't know better.

This stupidity happens also on server side. Oh boy does it happen on server side.

You really don't want to know how many basically static sites that would do fine with static HTML, css for styling and some javascript for a couple neat animations are actually made with bigass CMS frameworks like Joomla (it's a php framework that allows non-web-developers to make changes to a website with a wysiwyg editor or add content as if it was a forum), so each of these pieces of shit has a php and sql server and whatever else running to serve like 4 static pages with some animations, just because the "web developer" is not even a true web developer but is just a poser moron and the client does not know better.

Then some complain to me that the VM of their webserver (also running Windows Server 2016, because they only know how to use Windows with a GUI) gets insta-pwned the moment it goes online and some botnet scanning the internet for such pieces of garbage servers installs cryptominers in the VM.

Of course they don't like my answer that they would need to hire someone that isn't a moron to make their site so it could be actually made halfway safe (or even better have the site made with one of many third party hosting companies), so they usually just ask me to clean it and update the software and hope that it isn't insta-pwned again (hint: it is, like all the times).

There are many, many of these insta-pwned VMs running around with their virtual CPU at 100% running some cryptominer software in our clients servers.

[ssokolow]

This stupidity happens also on server side. Oh boy does it happen on server side.

You really don't want to know how many basically static sites that would do fine with static HTML, css for styling and some javascript for a couple neat animations are actually made with bigass CMS frameworks like Joomla (it's a php framework that allows non-web-developers to make changes to a website with a wysiwyg editor or add content as if it was a forum), so each of these pieces of shit has a php and sql server and whatever else running to serve like 4 static pages with some animations, just because the "web developer" is not even a true web developer but is just a poser moron and the client does not know better.

Then some complain to me that the VM of their webserver (also running Windows Server 2016, because they only know how to use Windows with a GUI) gets insta-pwned the moment it goes online and some botnet scanning the internet for such pieces of garbage servers installs cryptominers in the VM.

Of course they don't like my answer that they would need to hire someone that isn't a moron to make their site so it could be actually made halfway safe (or even better have the site made with one of many third party hosting companies), so they usually just ask me to clean it and update the software and hope that it isn't insta-pwned again (hint: it is, like all the times).

There are many, many of these insta-pwned VMs running around with their virtual CPU at 100% running some cryptominer software in our clients servers.

*nod* My blog is using WordPress, but only because I'm practically militant about not breaking links, allowing visitors to comment, and not tracking users and I haven't had time to:

1. Set up the tooling necessary to run a local mirror in a VM and point a spider at it to generate a list of every single link I need to replicate under Jekyll or Pelican or some other static site templater.
2. Write a self-hosted Disqus analogue. (Probably using Rust and actix-web to avoid wasting my VPS resources.)

(ie. I'm using WordPress because that's what I chose back in 2004 when I was fresh out of high school and didn't want to use something like LiveJournal.)

I'm very diligent about keeping it patched up, and I use various techniques to harden it (eg. disabling API endpoints I don't use, denying the web interface permission to self-update in favour of using wp-cli over SSH, and moving the login page to a non-standard path to foil basic bots), but it's still annoying that it feels like I make more visits to it to apply updates than to post.

[Luke_Wolf]

HTML is starting to grow into something nice, for what it is, but the problem is how it is used. I mean, the vast majority of HTML pages are static, but still uses dynamic interpreters so that the same calculations are performed over and over, often hundreds of millions of times. That's the insanity of how we use technology.

Hardly, half of the problem is that HTML is not only not a standard but a suggestion, but it's a suggestion that is mostly meaningless. Almost none of the tags actually even mean anything so everyone uses a bunch of divs and spans instead, and not only do they do that but then they're using a nasty mess of Javascript and CSS to create the widgets they actually want to use. But basically they need to do the following:
1. Make web techs an actual standard rather than a suggestion, that means failing with error codes when they don't successfully parse, rather than making a best guess
2. HTML needs to become closer to XAML, QML, Android XML, etc
a. Layout does not belong in the style engine, Layout belongs with the widgets
b. There needs to be a wealth of widgets that actually mean things, with only special cases requiring you to create your own widget
c. Make the use of divs and spans outside of what's actually text processing the exception rather than the norm.

Do that and maybe HTML will begin to grow into something nice. Right now it's hot garbage.

[rene]

how does it solve problem of apps feeling alien on the desktop.

sometimes I wonder if Michael knows what he is writing, or he is just after page views and comments, … :-/

[cj.wijtmans]

Hardly, half of the problem is that HTML is not only not a standard but a suggestion, but it's a suggestion that is mostly meaningless. Almost none of the tags actually even mean anything so everyone uses a bunch of divs and spans instead, and not only do they do that but then they're using a nasty mess of Javascript and CSS to create the widgets they actually want to use. But basically they need to do the following:
1. Make web techs an actual standard rather than a suggestion, that means failing with error codes when they don't successfully parse, rather than making a best guess
2. HTML needs to become closer to XAML, QML, Android XML, etc
a. Layout does not belong in the style engine, Layout belongs with the widgets
b. There needs to be a wealth of widgets that actually mean things, with only special cases requiring you to create your own widget
c. Make the use of divs and spans outside of what's actually text processing the exception rather than the norm.

Do that and maybe HTML will begin to grow into something nice. Right now it's hot garbage.

i wish there was a time display element that accepted unix timestamps. that would be great. but instead you would have to output UTC(in case theres no javscript) anbd then use javascript to convert to native time format...

[ssokolow]

i wish there was a time display element that accepted unix timestamps. that would be great. but instead you would have to output UTC anbd then use javascript to convert to native time format...

Accepting "seconds since the epoch" and displaying a timestamp, convrted to the user's local timezone, without JavaScript are orthogonal. The former, you're probably not going to get, since it'd be inconsistent with existing stuff. The latter, I could see a possibility for.

[Zyklon]

I just wrote a really small static site - fonts are not correctly loaded on IE, and font-size is bigger in Safari then in any other browser. So sure, why don't application developers want to care about the crap web developers sadly have to deal with all the time... 🤦♂

[mbello]

Such a ridiculous situation, really. At the beginning, web sucked as each and every interaction required a full page reload. Then came AJAX and web pages started to behave more like the Desktop UI we were all used to. Fast forward 20 years and we went full circle, web technology that struggled so much to finally offer "desktop-gui-like experience" are now being used as desktop-gui technology. But no, it is not a good idea.
To make HTML5 + CSS + JS behave it takes an incredible amount of code. Code written in inneficient scripting language, with many layers of abstraction and then we come to actually rendering HTML which takes a huge piece of software.

But then why are we here now? That speaks mostly to the failure of Desktop GUI technology in evolving with times. Delphi and Visual C++/C#/Basic are no longer an option (we now actually care about supporting multiple platforms). Java never took off (for good reasons). There are some interesting options, like Qt, but C++ is a big reason not to even try it.
Maybe Flutter will finally fill this void?

[brrrrttttt]

That applies to any software not just HTML. But I agree. Tax the shit out of them. Any known optimization (recalculation is one such thing) that's not done on purpose due to whatever reason (laziness, "tainting" code, etc) should be taxed or made a criminal offense, because it kills the planet a little bit more when it's ran on clients' PCs.

Likewise is any use of shit-tier bloated and slow languages for non-trivial tasks (again, mostly and especially if it's distributed, if it's for a build script or whatever, then it's more reasonable because millions won't get to execute it).

Tax those fuckers till they learn.

That's a very one-eyed view. The net benefit to society from enabling a much larger and more diverse group of people to create content is likely far larger than the extra CPU cycles consumed because they couldn't hand-write a dynamic web application in x86, x86_64, ARM, ARM + NEON, etc. assembler (yes, that's the logical conclusion of your "known optimization" argument). Life must be tough when you're unable to make such compromises?

[Luke_Wolf]

Such a ridiculous situation, really. At the beginning, web sucked as each and every interaction required a full page reload. Then came AJAX and web pages started to behave more like the Desktop UI we were all used to. Fast forward 20 years and we went full circle, web technology that struggled so much to finally offer "desktop-gui-like experience" are now being used as desktop-gui technology. But no, it is not a good idea.
To make HTML5 + CSS + JS behave it takes an incredible amount of code. Code written in inneficient scripting language, with many layers of abstraction and then we come to actually rendering HTML which takes a huge piece of software.

But then why are we here now? That speaks mostly to the failure of Desktop GUI technology in evolving with times. Delphi and Visual C++/C#/Basic are no longer an option (we now actually care about supporting multiple platforms). Java never took off (for good reasons). There are some interesting options, like Qt, but C++ is a big reason not to even try it.
Maybe Flutter will finally fill this void?

Eh... no. There was no failure of desktop GUI technology, What happened was that the web became a big deal and the web technologies happen to be very forgiving which meant that a bunch of low skilled jackoffs jumped on board and were afraid to move to other technologies, because they could focus all of their energy on The Web and make some decent money doing that. A few of these jackoffs decided that they wanted to try their hand at application development and due to the whims of the market some of these became accepted, but even today the vast vast majority of applications that a user will use are still using standard Desktop GUI technologies rather than crap like Electron, and on mobile developers have largely abandoned mobile websites for native applications, which use technologies that are in all practical measures equivalent to their desktop counterparts. A WPF or Qt/QML developer would be right at home with Android development and vice versa.