Slashdot Mirror
Google Abandoning Gears
harrymcc noted a story talking about what might be the end of Google Gears. The concept has always been interesting, but it seems that Google is beginning to think of Gears as more of a proof of concept, and that focus will shift to HTML5, which has the same functionality.
from actually working with this stuff. Quite alot already.
Exactly. HTML 5 is being deployed piecemeal, and Gears uses the HTML 5 features when they're available, falling back to its own functionality when it isn't. When all that Gears is doing is delegating functionality to the native HTML 5 implementation, it's pointless and just adds a layer of indirection that slows everything down.
Gears is out and works now. HTML 5 is starting to be widely deployed and all of the major browser manufacturers are backing it (MS announced IE9 will support it). When HTML 5 is universal, there will be no point in Gears. It never had a long-term future, it was just a prototype. Several of the HTML 5 features are lifted directly from Gears, so saying Google are abandoning Gears is no more interesting than saying Microsoft are abandoning Windows 95.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
HTML 5 does exactly what it says it does.
Dive into HTML 5 tells you what that is, and whether your browser supports it.
It's up to developers to apply it. Google is doing so.
Read the spec, compare it with browser implementations. A few things are deployed and work well now, such as the video and audio tags in FireFox and Safari (although they support different CODECs out of the box) and client-side storage. The latter is the big one that Gears provided; with HTML 5 there are existing implementations of both the JavaScript persistent object storage and the database-style version (which lets you run SQL queries against a local store). Most of the new form elements are already supported by Gecko and WebKit and Canvas (which allows drawing on a PostScript-style model) has been working in both for ages.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's got nothing to do with "tags", the whole point of the HTML5 API is to try and evolve the request -> response model we have at the moment. for example, WebSockets http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/ event based full duplex communications. Or that you can now actually store files locally (applicationCache), so for example client side templates would be possible, only send the data that changes, not as happens now, everything over, and over again. The new tags in HTML5 are not the important bits.
I'm no web designer so perhaps I'm misunderstanding TFA, but is offline script caching one of the features of HTML5?
Yes.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/offline.html#offline
I'm not saying people *shouldn't* use it, I'm excited about it myself. What I'm saying is, realistically, the majority of sites will never convert to HTML5. The lesson being: make your standards great, because they Never. Go. Away.
Sorry I shouldn't post at 6:30 AM
Comment of the year