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"The biggest issue holding back Web Development isn't Internet Explorer. It's incompetent developers." IMO the biggest issue holding back web development is th

"The biggest issue holding back Web Development isn't Internet Explorer. It's incompetent developers." IMO the biggest issue holding back web development is that the technology at the foundation of the web is all pretty shitty for building real applications and now we have hacks upon hacks to have a stateless protocol meant for document display to act as a full application environment. Don't get me wrong, I stand in awe at the amazing things some people are able to build on this shaky foundation and I don't discount how incredible it is that the web even exists at all with buy in from all the major corporations (Google, MS, Apple, etc) who otherwise want to rip each others throats out... But at the end of the day, ignoring all of the context of history, if the web didn't exist and I asked someone to come up with a way to develop rich, secure, network-bound apps and he went to work on it for some years and the wire protocol he came up with for it was anything like HTTP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript, I'd think he was a complete moron.

pjmlp 14y ago
> IMO the biggest issue holding back web development is that the technology at the foundation of the web is all pretty shitty for building real applications and now we have hacks upon hacks to have a stateless protocol meant for document display to act as a full application environment. That is what the OS and desktop is for.
- maigret 14y ago
  I used to think that, but honestly the desktop lost in 2005 with the rise of Ajax. There's probably no way back. And HTML5 is even doing markup elegant.
  - pjmlp 14y ago
    > There's probably no way back. Yes there is, native applications in mobile devices.
    - maigret 14y ago
      If anything, I see the same pattern on mobile as on desktop: - Native is the only way at the beginning - Multiple platforms appear - Devs begin to see the cost of developing x times the same app - Browsers get more powerful and easier to program, native functions are made available on the browser. Have you seen Boot to Gecko? I've seen that in real on a phone, that looked real good. Don't know how the day to day use is, but is not mature yet and will probably gain capabilities. I see lots of potential in that kind of technology.
- EnderMB 14y ago
  You beat me to it! We've done well to get as far as we have with HTML5, JavaScript and everything else in-between. However, the web is not a suitable platform to develop on. Sure, it's very handy and there are some applications that work well on the web (i.e. Gmail) but people keep going overboard with their ideas, trying to create graphics applications and "Web OS's" and other tools that really just don't work.
borplk 14y ago
Absolutely spot on. It really bugs me how much all developers around the world have to suffer because they have to go to great lengths the stretch this framework to do things that it was never designed to be capable of. I think Zed Shaw also mentioned a lot of these issues in one of his talks recently. There was a lot of cross-browser compatibility issues developers had to deal with. Now cross-device is also added on top of that.
mr_luc 14y ago
What GUI frameworks out there are more pleasant to write client-server GUI apps in than the modern web? I'm amazed at how we got where we are, too. But I don't feel that it's a particularly shaky combination. A markup format, the abstraction of stylesheets, and a powerful scripting language to make the documents 'alive' - it seems like The Elements. I really feel as though, if we set out to do better than the web, we'd either end up with applets or what we have now.
prodigal_erik 14y ago
> technology at the foundation of the web is all pretty shitty for building real applications What we need is for people to stop wasting their time on those semantically-impaired application silos and contribute more useful (progressively enhanced) content before the web of multipurpose hypertext completely disintegrates.

pjmlp 14y ago

> IMO the biggest issue holding back web development is that the technology at the foundation of the web is all pretty shitty for building real applications and now we have hacks upon hacks to have a stateless protocol meant for document display to act as a full application environment. That is what the OS and desktop is for.

maigret 14y ago
I used to think that, but honestly the desktop lost in 2005 with the rise of Ajax. There's probably no way back. And HTML5 is even doing markup elegant.
- pjmlp 14y ago
  > There's probably no way back. Yes there is, native applications in mobile devices.
  - maigret 14y ago
    If anything, I see the same pattern on mobile as on desktop: - Native is the only way at the beginning - Multiple platforms appear - Devs begin to see the cost of developing x times the same app - Browsers get more powerful and easier to program, native functions are made available on the browser. Have you seen Boot to Gecko? I've seen that in real on a phone, that looked real good. Don't know how the day to day use is, but is not mature yet and will probably gain capabilities. I see lots of potential in that kind of technology.
EnderMB 14y ago
You beat me to it! We've done well to get as far as we have with HTML5, JavaScript and everything else in-between. However, the web is not a suitable platform to develop on. Sure, it's very handy and there are some applications that work well on the web (i.e. Gmail) but people keep going overboard with their ideas, trying to create graphics applications and "Web OS's" and other tools that really just don't work.

borplk 14y ago

Absolutely spot on. It really bugs me how much all developers around the world have to suffer because they have to go to great lengths the stretch this framework to do things that it was never designed to be capable of. I think Zed Shaw also mentioned a lot of these issues in one of his talks recently. There was a lot of cross-browser compatibility issues developers had to deal with. Now cross-device is also added on top of that.

mr_luc 14y ago

What GUI frameworks out there are more pleasant to write client-server GUI apps in than the modern web? I'm amazed at how we got where we are, too. But I don't feel that it's a particularly shaky combination. A markup format, the abstraction of stylesheets, and a powerful scripting language to make the documents 'alive' - it seems like The Elements. I really feel as though, if we set out to do better than the web, we'd either end up with applets or what we have now.

prodigal_erik 14y ago

> technology at the foundation of the web is all pretty shitty for building real applications What we need is for people to stop wasting their time on those semantically-impaired application silos and contribute more useful (progressively enhanced) content before the web of multipurpose hypertext completely disintegrates.