<story><title>Hoplon: A Simpler Way to Program the Web</title><url>http://hoplon.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>prodigal_erik</author><text>&amp;gt; Reload this page with JavaScript disabled and see how the content was &amp;quot;prerendered&amp;quot; at compile time.&lt;p&gt;To their credit, the page is not blank, unlike a lot of &amp;quot;web&amp;quot; authors out there. Unfortunately there are several links that point to invalid and nonexistent fragments like #&amp;#x2F;home&amp;#x2F; instead of actual elements of that or some other document, which really means the framework is happy to make a siloed javascript app and does not ensure you are responsibly making all your content available as part of the world-wide web at some stable URL where third parties can reference it.&lt;p&gt;tl,dr: this encourages single-page apps which will be the death of the web.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mekoka</author><text>&amp;gt; tl,dr: this encourages single-page apps which will be the death of the web.&lt;p&gt;The first sentence of the &amp;quot;Web Apps&amp;quot; section is &lt;i&gt;Web ap­pli­ca­tions are not doc­u­ments&lt;/i&gt;. This is a motto that I believe a lot of people who think the way you do should take pause and reflect upon.&lt;p&gt;After years producing web apps, I came to the conclusion that non-js web apps are some of the craziest ideas ever. The browser without js is a tool to consume and, to some very minimal extent, produce documents. I consider most non-js apps on the browser to be huge hacks at best, that do what they can to circumvent the shortcomings of that technology. And heaven knows that shortcomings are a dime a dozen (lack of http method on anchors, limited to GET and POST, to only name a few).&lt;p&gt;If you do embrace building apps with js, then you need to stop thinking in the document-oriented paradigm, otherwise you&amp;#x27;ll be making some unnecessary  compromises at the expense of your end users, and you&amp;#x27;ll be making your life harder as a developer. For instance, some actions that the standalone or native version of your application does with a single click might require 3 or 4 user interventions on the browser version, simply because you wish to remain true to some dogma.&lt;p&gt;A while back I&amp;#x27;ve embraced the idea that web apps aren&amp;#x27;t documents. It freed me as an app developer to make choices that were otherwise unthinkable in a previous mindset. My APIs make more sense, my interfaces are more intuitive and my users are the happier for it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Hoplon: A Simpler Way to Program the Web</title><url>http://hoplon.io/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>prodigal_erik</author><text>&amp;gt; Reload this page with JavaScript disabled and see how the content was &amp;quot;prerendered&amp;quot; at compile time.&lt;p&gt;To their credit, the page is not blank, unlike a lot of &amp;quot;web&amp;quot; authors out there. Unfortunately there are several links that point to invalid and nonexistent fragments like #&amp;#x2F;home&amp;#x2F; instead of actual elements of that or some other document, which really means the framework is happy to make a siloed javascript app and does not ensure you are responsibly making all your content available as part of the world-wide web at some stable URL where third parties can reference it.&lt;p&gt;tl,dr: this encourages single-page apps which will be the death of the web.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nnq</author><text>&amp;gt; single-page apps will be the death of the web&lt;p&gt;What en earth makes you think that? Yeah, the current way of doing SPAs without fallback for non-js clients is horrible and the alternative of a two-way site too much work.&lt;p&gt;But the solution is obvious: if what you serve is of any meaning to anyone else, you also have some sort of content consumption API. Sooner or later we&amp;#x27;ll standardize some RESTy way of doing it for apps, and for blogs and magazines RSS&amp;#x2F;Atom feeds are already good enough content-consumption pseudo-APIs.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;The API will be the Javascript-less version of all sites, and all sites will have an API.&lt;/i&gt; Then people will make UIs for the content consumption parts of these (pseudo-)APIs, and these UIs, even if they run themselves in browsers will become the new &amp;quot;browsers&amp;quot; and gain their own scripting level features, while &amp;quot;old browser apps&amp;quot; will become today&amp;#x27;s equivalent of desktop apps.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not &amp;quot;death&amp;quot; of the web, just &amp;quot;endless, infinite pain&amp;quot; for us developers working in its perpetual shifting front-end... &lt;i&gt;it&amp;#x27;s way worse than death! :)&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>