6 ms·

While there are a couple of minor bits I agree with, overall I think Joe's off on this one. The web has five organizations pushing really hard on it at this po

by dangoor 15y ago

While there are a couple of minor bits I agree with, overall I think Joe's off on this one. The web has five organizations pushing really hard on it at this point (Mozilla [my employer], Google, Apple, Microsoft and Opera). The web almost had HP. We'll see what happens with WebOS. The one part of his article that I somewhat agree with is that under the guidance of several entities (and lots and lots of people) the web may not have quite the same coherence as, say, Cocoa. I'm not sure that will be a problem. "The Web has no one who can ensure that the platform acquires cutting edge capabilities in a timely manner (camera access, anyone?)." Five years ago, even two years ago, would anyone even be questioning adding camera access to the web? I think there's been a huge shift in terms of how people view web technology. gmail was the original "holy crap" app that started us building information apps with better user experiences. It proceeded from there to add things like canvas and svg and, more recently, webgl and audio, making apps well beyond "information apps" possible. The "Boot to Gecko" (B2G) project which Mozilla kicked off a couple of months back is going to push quite firmly on adding all of the APIs needed for a modern mobile device. And, I might add, in conjunction with others in the standards bodies who are interested in such things. And what about the Metro announcement from last week? Sure, Microsoft's ideal scenario is to build on the web and lock people into APIs that are tied to their platform... but, seriously, wouldn't people just write shims? Wouldn't Microsoft ultimately have to follow the standard because they are not quite the monopoly they were before? The end of his post is telling: "The closest thing we have to that today is Chromium, but they have no foothold in mobile and are likely years away from having one. And so I end on a sad note" So, the crux of it would seem to be that Joe sees the world going mobile. I certainly agree. I got my start on a TRS-80 model III, and the stuff happening in mobile is the most exciting stuff I've seen in my entire career. I've been working with the web for 16 years. There has never been a time in the past when so much effort was being put into pushing the web-as-a-platform forward. It's huge and I, for one, think the best is yet to come.

nupark2 15y ago
The one part of his article that I somewhat agree with is that under the guidance of several entities (and lots and lots of people) the web may not have quite the same coherence as, say, Cocoa. I'm not sure that will be a problem. It's already a problem. In fact, it is the problem. The web application 'platform' is poor, incoherent, and its proponents highly resistant to the sweeping changes that would be necessary to compete with a native, proprietary platform like iOS. The best chance the 'web' has for success is with projects like NaCL, but even that will only fix the execution environment -- we'll still need higher-level platform frameworks upon which applications can be built. Perhaps Google will supply usable application frameworks, as they've done (if poorly) with Android. The browser makers (especially Mozilla) seem insistent on leaving us in the lurch, stuck with JavaScript, the DOM, and the painfully long lead times of standardization.
- dangoor 15y ago
  "It's already a problem. In fact, it is the problem. The web application 'platform' is poor, incoherent, and its proponents highly resistant to the sweeping changes that would be necessary to compete with a native, proprietary platform like iOS." Which "sweeping changes" are those? Changes like the ability to draw pixel-by-pixel? Vectors? 3D? (Canvas/svg/webgl) Changes like higher level form controls? Got some in HTML5. New component model is under discussion now. Better layout of controls? The flexible box model helps a great deal, is already in lots of shipping browsers and is getting further cleaned up now. Drag and drop? Yep. How about the automatic data binding that's so cool in Cocoa? Not only are there application frameworks that do this (SproutCore, Knockout, Batman), there are also proposals like "Model Driven Views" (MDV) which use ECMAScript Harmony Proxy objects to make it cleaner. What about files? Yeah, there are file APIs. Databases? localStorage is a simple key/value store. There's also WebSQL DB and IndexedDB which will hopefully be resolved in one way or another soon. APIs for audio and geolocation are there now. Camera and other device APIs are in the works. So, which sweeping changes do you mean? The ability to compile C code? Sorry, but I don't think most apps need that. "The browser makers (especially Mozilla) seem insistent on leaving us in the lurch, stuck with JavaScript, the DOM, and the painfully long lead times of standardization." I can't say this for sure, but I'd be willing to bet that: a. standardization is moving faster than it has in more than a decade b. many APIs become usable in the real world well before the standards are complete To be sure, the web-as-a-platform is not perfect today or in the future. But, its evolution is real.
  - joehewitt 15y ago
    Yeah, the checklist of web technologies is getting longer, but that's only part of the solution. They don't all work together very well. For example, Alex Russell has been opining recently about the way DOM interfaces are awkwardly adapted to JavaScript due to the committee's insistence on targetting IDL. That's why the W3C could never have invented jQuery. I've been trying to duplicate native scrolling in iOS recently and I'm getting killed by details that the specifications don't cover and WebKit authors don't document. For example, tons of trial and error uncovered the fact that CSS keyframes animations are unusable for elements wider than 1024 pixels, due likely to OpenGL issues on iOS. If the W3C and WebKit had any clue how developers would actually use the stuff they design, they would have made this fact clear by at least providing a way to query the optimal texture size used under the covers. Over and over you find little examples like this which demonstrate that the web's "leadership" is completely disconnected from reality on the ground.
joehewitt 15y ago
It didn't take a seer to imagine that having camera access was a good idea, but it takes a pretty boneheaded committee to wait this long to do it. Hell, Adobe put camera access in Flash years before iOS even existed. I don't love Flash, but even they benefitted from have a single owner. Lots of good things coming to the platform now, but progress was even faster in the mid-90's when Netscape and IE were growing up. IE4 and IE5 in particular had a lot of great features that have since been forgotten, and are only now being reconsidered for standardization. Remember behaviors, image filters, CSS expressions, and data binding?
- dangoor 15y ago
  They had data binding? I don't remember that (that's a pet feature of mine ;) From what I've seen, things don't really start in the committees. They start with people at browser vendors scratching their own itches and eventually escape out into the committees. In some ways, that's why it's good that there are 5 organizations pushing forward. One with an itch for camera access will help force the others to take action. Data binding aside, I do remember the mid- to late-90s and I think the pace is faster now. Perhaps I'm biased since I work for a browser vendor... but I'm not actually a browser developer myself. I'm a web developer. And, I see interesting new capabilities popping up pretty rapidly.
  - joehewitt 15y ago
    Hell yeah, they had data binding in the 90's. Was ahead of its time, like XMLHttpRequest, but never caught on. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531385(v=vs.85).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531385(v=vs.85).as...
- dangoor 15y ago
  I realize that my reply didn't address the fact that camera access took a long time. You're right... I don't think it's because of a boneheaded committee, though. I'm just guessing, because I have nothing to do with this directly, but I'm guessing that people either: 1. weren't really thinking that the web needed camera access 2. thought there were higher priority things And yes, Flash had camera access first. How's that working out for them relative to web technologies?

by dangoor 15y ago

nupark2 15y ago

The one part of his article that I somewhat agree with is that under the guidance of several entities (and lots and lots of people) the web may not have quite the same coherence as, say, Cocoa. I'm not sure that will be a problem. It's already a problem. In fact, it is the problem. The web application 'platform' is poor, incoherent, and its proponents highly resistant to the sweeping changes that would be necessary to compete with a native, proprietary platform like iOS. The best chance the 'web' has for success is with projects like NaCL, but even that will only fix the execution environment -- we'll still need higher-level platform frameworks upon which applications can be built. Perhaps Google will supply usable application frameworks, as they've done (if poorly) with Android. The browser makers (especially Mozilla) seem insistent on leaving us in the lurch, stuck with JavaScript, the DOM, and the painfully long lead times of standardization.

dangoor 15y ago
"It's already a problem. In fact, it is the problem. The web application 'platform' is poor, incoherent, and its proponents highly resistant to the sweeping changes that would be necessary to compete with a native, proprietary platform like iOS." Which "sweeping changes" are those? Changes like the ability to draw pixel-by-pixel? Vectors? 3D? (Canvas/svg/webgl) Changes like higher level form controls? Got some in HTML5. New component model is under discussion now. Better layout of controls? The flexible box model helps a great deal, is already in lots of shipping browsers and is getting further cleaned up now. Drag and drop? Yep. How about the automatic data binding that's so cool in Cocoa? Not only are there application frameworks that do this (SproutCore, Knockout, Batman), there are also proposals like "Model Driven Views" (MDV) which use ECMAScript Harmony Proxy objects to make it cleaner. What about files? Yeah, there are file APIs. Databases? localStorage is a simple key/value store. There's also WebSQL DB and IndexedDB which will hopefully be resolved in one way or another soon. APIs for audio and geolocation are there now. Camera and other device APIs are in the works. So, which sweeping changes do you mean? The ability to compile C code? Sorry, but I don't think most apps need that. "The browser makers (especially Mozilla) seem insistent on leaving us in the lurch, stuck with JavaScript, the DOM, and the painfully long lead times of standardization." I can't say this for sure, but I'd be willing to bet that: a. standardization is moving faster than it has in more than a decade b. many APIs become usable in the real world well before the standards are complete To be sure, the web-as-a-platform is not perfect today or in the future. But, its evolution is real.
- joehewitt 15y ago
  Yeah, the checklist of web technologies is getting longer, but that's only part of the solution. They don't all work together very well. For example, Alex Russell has been opining recently about the way DOM interfaces are awkwardly adapted to JavaScript due to the committee's insistence on targetting IDL. That's why the W3C could never have invented jQuery. I've been trying to duplicate native scrolling in iOS recently and I'm getting killed by details that the specifications don't cover and WebKit authors don't document. For example, tons of trial and error uncovered the fact that CSS keyframes animations are unusable for elements wider than 1024 pixels, due likely to OpenGL issues on iOS. If the W3C and WebKit had any clue how developers would actually use the stuff they design, they would have made this fact clear by at least providing a way to query the optimal texture size used under the covers. Over and over you find little examples like this which demonstrate that the web's "leadership" is completely disconnected from reality on the ground.

joehewitt 15y ago

It didn't take a seer to imagine that having camera access was a good idea, but it takes a pretty boneheaded committee to wait this long to do it. Hell, Adobe put camera access in Flash years before iOS even existed. I don't love Flash, but even they benefitted from have a single owner. Lots of good things coming to the platform now, but progress was even faster in the mid-90's when Netscape and IE were growing up. IE4 and IE5 in particular had a lot of great features that have since been forgotten, and are only now being reconsidered for standardization. Remember behaviors, image filters, CSS expressions, and data binding?

dangoor 15y ago
They had data binding? I don't remember that (that's a pet feature of mine ;) From what I've seen, things don't really start in the committees. They start with people at browser vendors scratching their own itches and eventually escape out into the committees. In some ways, that's why it's good that there are 5 organizations pushing forward. One with an itch for camera access will help force the others to take action. Data binding aside, I do remember the mid- to late-90s and I think the pace is faster now. Perhaps I'm biased since I work for a browser vendor... but I'm not actually a browser developer myself. I'm a web developer. And, I see interesting new capabilities popping up pretty rapidly.
- joehewitt 15y ago
  Hell yeah, they had data binding in the 90's. Was ahead of its time, like XMLHttpRequest, but never caught on. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531385(v=vs.85).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531385(v=vs.85).as...
dangoor 15y ago
I realize that my reply didn't address the fact that camera access took a long time. You're right... I don't think it's because of a boneheaded committee, though. I'm just guessing, because I have nothing to do with this directly, but I'm guessing that people either: 1. weren't really thinking that the web needed camera access 2. thought there were higher priority things And yes, Flash had camera access first. How's that working out for them relative to web technologies?