Red_Fist wrote:
ALL web pages should work ,lets say on Netscape 1, wasn't the reason for inventing HTML to make things work while not downloading hardly any bytes ?
Allow me to show you the problem of what you're saying:
1 - Computers were invented for text processing, calculus and storage and organization of information in business and R&D, it was never intended to be used to play games, browse the web, watching videos nor anything of that at all.
2 - However, you probably use your computer for everything but to what it was invented for, and the first computers cannot run any of what you use nowadays.
By that order of ideas UT should work in the first computers which could only render text and didn't have any graphic cards, nor sound boards, nor anything like that... but it doesn't... why? Because things evolve, old becomes obsolete in trade for a better "new".
Plus, HTML is just a markup language to make browsers *render* stuff using rules written in plain text, it was never to " make things work while not downloading hardly any bytes", in fact it's just to make it easier for the developer to build pages and to be a standard, something that would work in every browser, otherwise if saving bytes was the most important thing, then HTML is not the solution, and there's something older called serialization, it's basically pure organized bytes which are pretty much unreadable by humans and allow to store and organize tons of information in a small organized byte structure, with rules as well.
As everything else, HTML itself evolved during the years, and nowadays the latest one is HTML5.
Also, what you see in the page is not HTML alone anymore, you see images and all this pretty organization in the forum is done through CSS, and Javascript too.
Analytics runs completely in javascript as well in fact.
Actually, CSS helps the site to get rid of images to download if you're not aware: styles that could only be achieved with images before can easily be setup using CSS using text alone.
Anyway, many browsers came up, and as they advanced, Internet Explorer slowed down and was always several steps behind (IE8 is still several steps behind too), and actually it's thanks to browsers like IE that you need to have flash, silverlight and download an extra 1Mb to 2Mb of images just to see a website properly.
So everything you're defending in how light and plugins free the sites should be, it's actually thanks to IE many of them are still around and actually needed.
Quick example: don't websites look nicer with rounded corners, instead of looking so blocky? Guess what, for every major browser the developer only has to add 4 short lines of text in CSS to do rounded corners, in IE you have to use images and a shit ton of HTML and CSS combined...
Another example: progress bars. Everytime you upload something you like to see a progress bar or status. So far, it was only possible by using Flash, however with HTML5 is going to start to be possible to do progress bars without Flash, however IE only started to support HTML5 itself very very very veeeeeeery late. Firefox and Chrome were already starting to add more HTML5 features to avoid using Flash altogether, while IE didn't have the slightest support for it.
So, in a short resume: the need for stuff like Flash, Java, all sorts of plugins and extra bandwidth to load up a website is ALL thanks to IE alone. All the other browsers tried to settle a standard between them by offering common features to improve performance and avoid such things, yet IE ruins the party for everyone by staying years behind and neglecting the need of doing the same or even better.
IE sucks, that's all there's to it.