I'm fully on board with this.<p>I've been trying to get people to realize the power of the browser as a ubiquitous runtime for local software (akin to the way that /usr/bin/python and /bin/bash are situated to run scripts loaded from disk). But there's evidence of an obvious mental block when I try engaging with people. It's as if when you speak about the browser, people immediately start slipping and don't stop until they've arrived mentally at a thin client interacting with an application running on a remote server. No. I'm talking about <i>documents</i> that are meant to be <i>saved to your machine</i> and later opened from a file picker (with e.g. Ctrl+O) or double clicked in your file manager. They also happen to be able to be made interactive, and are self-contained, not unlike a partially baked spreadsheet with macros ready and willing to accept your input.<p>The author is spot-on with the metaphor to woodworking jigs.<p>If there's some criticism I have, it's here:<p>> The goal is not to produce a system that runs forever as has historically been the aim of software for the government and, subsequently, large tech behemoths.<p>The perverse thing is that this method of development is <i>more</i> likely to produce something that can run "forever", accidentally doing a much better job than any SaaS peddler. The biggest threat to this is the shrinking land area, as one tech behemoth uses its leverage (although all browser vendors are complicit) to force more people to conform to its expectations of fitting into the contemporary webdev mold when it comes to what media a commodity browser will accept.<p>And then, aside from that, I'm struck that the author may be overly focused on collage. I've said it before: self-contained HTML is (in many cases, at least) an acceptable substitute for office file formats. You can even get your traditional office suite to give you HTML instead of its native format, usually. Here's to hoping that this remains viable as the affordances of file:// space are chipped away.
I feel like Illich would have despised the browser as it is of a cowardly sort of simplicity, one that shoves complexity behind a massive amount of bloat leaving only space to participants who can afford the top-of-the-line fastest possible hardware, encouraging the incessant purchase of increasingly faster machines.<p>In browser application development, ease of use is usually implemented as superficial simplicity, as an additional layer of complexity that hides the underlying layers. Meanwhile, systems that are actually very simple and elegant are often presented in ways that make them look complex to laypeople.<p>This reminds me of DawnOS's author's note: "Imagine that software development becomes so complex and expensive that no software is being written anymore, only apps designed in devtools."<p>-- Sent from a computer that can barely display modern websites, and being constantly asked to participate in Slack or Discord channel which it cannot.
Great article, I immediately started to think back to vvvv[1], a great tool I used to use when I was still on Windows. It had many moments of "oh there’s a node for just that!" which allowed me to just go on with my initial plan instead of having to yak-shave my way into details until I could do what I came to do. Not that there wasn't a learning curve. But I created so many small explorative one-off interfaces and tools.<p>I have found nothing like it on Linux so far, instead I use Python, which is cool, but so, so different.<p>[1] <a href="https://betadocs.vvvv.org/learning/tutorials/hello-world.html" rel="nofollow">https://betadocs.vvvv.org/learning/tutorials/hello-world.htm...</a>
Reminds me of Kinopio [1], a similar kind of hackable web canvas for placing text/media and mapping out ideas. The creator was one of the co-creators of Glitch and made a hackernews post about it recently [2]<p>[1]: <a href="https://kinopio.club" rel="nofollow">https://kinopio.club</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31460626" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31460626</a>