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It may be poor reasoning but my vote is on the web (html/css/js/etc). Why? because it seems to be the only thing that has stuck around in the past. Over the p

It may be poor reasoning but my vote is on the web (html/css/js/etc). Why? because it seems to be the only thing that has stuck around in the past. Over the past 20 years we've seen the "web" gobble up all sorts of client side platforms - applets, flash, and a lot of other native desktop applications. Do I think it is the best suited technology to all the things we are trying to do with it? - Absolutely not, but I wouldn't dare invest myself in anything that competes with it.

rimantas 14y ago
Not sure how web gobbled applets and flash: those were the things intended for the web. As for native apps, they are doing just fine. Heck, I moved to gmail in 2005 and used web version for a long time, but now I use it via Sparrow, both on desktop and on mobile. I've been doing web development for 14 years, I love it and I am pretty good at it, but when developing for iOS I prefer native. Frameworks are great, I like the language, life is good. Doing all in HTML/CSS/JS? Sure possible. But then we go back to the world of pain because of the gazillion of rendering engines (even if most of them are WebKit). What many miss is that limited screen real estate complicates things—you must to get it look good in most of the configurations, "good enough" is not good enough. The same goes to interaction: people are used to wait when using web apps, but just a slightest lag on touch devices will drive them crazy—when you touch something with your finger directly it better react instantly. So basically, the idea of web apps killing or even significantly affecting native apps is too naive, in my opinion. That said, nothing needs to kill anything. We still have radio, we still have cinemas, we still have theater.