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Great article. Chrome is an amazing piece of software. Talking about web browsers, I can't wait for the next big step. Mozilla and Google are already moving ah

by nzonbi 14y ago

Great article. Chrome is an amazing piece of software. Talking about web browsers, I can't wait for the next big step. Mozilla and Google are already moving ahead: When web browsers become the whole OS. With web apps becoming fully capable, and with native apps increasingly network integrated, the distinction is becoming meaningless. In that vision of web browsers as OSs, there is a big limitation. More than some still incomplete APIs, or a few ones still missing, the problem is the whole development story. Web development is still a chaos. The web platform, is a soup with far too many ingredients. Why we still have to develop application's UIs, using a document markup engine?. The web is rich. There are all kinds of resources. It is non-sense to express all of these resources, with a single development paradigm: html-css-javascript. Native development, is more flexible. There is the possibility of choosing the right tool for the job. I hope that one day not so far away, browsers will gain similar capabilities. Support for multiple separated, specialized development environments.

chipsy 14y ago
I think the necessary reworking is going to happen, but it will take a few cycles through the "Wheel of Reincarnation" to make it fully realized - with the rendering example, we now have Canvas and WebGL; instead of relying on the browser, you can create something completely customized, with the downside being that many of the supporting features of the document-renderer paradigm are lost. But it's the right technology for certain kinds of applications, and others can be rebuilt on top of that, and eventually you'll get frameworks, and so on. At each step, not everyone will be 100% happy with how things are organized, but enough of it will work that it expands the frontier of what kinds of software can be built on the web. We've been through this before - the web has worked because its paradigms keep getting stretched beyond expectations.

by nzonbi 14y ago

chipsy 14y ago

I think the necessary reworking is going to happen, but it will take a few cycles through the "Wheel of Reincarnation" to make it fully realized - with the rendering example, we now have Canvas and WebGL; instead of relying on the browser, you can create something completely customized, with the downside being that many of the supporting features of the document-renderer paradigm are lost. But it's the right technology for certain kinds of applications, and others can be rebuilt on top of that, and eventually you'll get frameworks, and so on. At each step, not everyone will be 100% happy with how things are organized, but enough of it will work that it expands the frontier of what kinds of software can be built on the web. We've been through this before - the web has worked because its paradigms keep getting stretched beyond expectations.