HTML Web App Development Still Has a Ways To Go

GMGruman writes "Neil McAllister was helping out a friend whose web developer disappeared. Neil's journey into his friend's website ended up being an archaeological dig through unstable remains, as layers of code in different languages easily broke when touched. Neil realized in that experience that the ever-growing jumble of standards, frameworks, and tools makes web application development harder than it needs to be. Although the Web is all about open standards where anyone can create variations for their specific needs and wants, Neil's experience reminded him that a tightly controlled ecosystem backed by a major vendor does make it easier to define best practices, set development targets, and deliver results with a minimum of chaos. There's something to be said for that."

Comments

The great thing about standards

[Anonymous Coward]

there are so many to chose from!

Re:Web development is hard for even talented peopl

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to troll. It's so sad that every one of your points is fairly well wrong and could earn you a post nearly as long in refute for each. If you read that post and thought it was insightful, you've been trolled.

Actually, having done some web development, I'd like to see some actual refutation of the parent post instead of just some implied snarkiness that the poster must be an idiot because you disagree with him. In fact, I'm not even sure I agree that it was a troll.

In my experience, the tools for web application development are overwhelmingly crufty, and a stateless, connectionless protocol is a nuisance. There's a whole slew of bolt-ons that try to hide the fact that the underlying HTML is completely unsuited for the task at hand, and they don't work consistently across browsers.

From a user perspective, I find that web interfaces frequently lead to way more clicking and waiting that an actual local app would. Layouts are crufty, and for reasons unknown to me, occasionally a page renders in completely fucked up ways.

I'm more inclined to agree with the article and the poster you replied to -- web development tools suck, and they frequently produce results that suck.

Re:Web development is hard for even talented peopl

[Alex Zepeda]

No, it's really not. The development tools are ass and the language itself fails with its non-intuitive comparison operators. Being prototype based leads to really nasty code and "creative" ways of scoping variables. But that's if you want to be pedantic. If you are willing to lump the standard library in with the language, then you've got even bigger problems. What's actually cross-platform is a pretty small subset of anything useful, leaving people to roll their own hacks.