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Microsoft, Google, Twitter Debate HTML5
jbrodkin writes "The annual USENIX conference featured an all-star lineup of engineers from Microsoft, Google, Twitter and Flipboard debating whether HTML5 is the 'holy grail' for building next-generation Web applications, and whether mobile developers should build websites or apps. The promise of HTML5 is 'write once, run everywhere,' but the panelists did not agree on whether the technology is good enough to make browser applications feel 'native.' There was general agreement that HTML5 is lacking on mobile devices, and that for better or worse the move toward apps instead of websites is being driven less by technology than the imperative to make money."
Isn't that what they said about Java? For which it humorously was said to be, "write once, wait everywhere"...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Are we positive we want to delegate all to the browser?
- web apps are easy to deploy.
- web apps can't match efficiency of native apps (it doesn't matter when you have a multicore desktop, it matters when your smartphone has way less autonomy than it could.
- web apps everywhere means they will have to be secured (compared with web 1.0 with standard ports for every protocol and a multitude of client/server software vs. port 80 and a handful of browsers)
- web apps can be seamlessly upgraded (even when user doesn't want to, though)
- native apps are hard to deploy (a free OS with package management, look at debian or experiments like nixos, solves this problem)
- FOSS native apps can be owned by the user.
Anyway, this is just a trend. Games will still be native, and people will hold onto their office suites, and some html5 features reduce the dependency from the network (local storage) which is good.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
abstraction layers on top? JQuery type implementations.
Those already exist for mobile devices, jQuery Mobile included.
Breakfast served all day!
There are a lot of things lumped under the "HTML5" moniker that go well beyond HTML the language: WebGL, Web Sockets, SVG, Geolocation, File API, Real-Time Events, Threading, not to mention the very large assortment of styling modules lumped under "CSS3". HTML5 represents more of an ecosystem now, like .NET.
No, it's not the end of the line for other ecosystems, this is just another new one. A very, very important one, to be sure, but it obviously won't fill every need for a client UI out there. That said, if my new shiny app could even remotely be done as a web app, I'd be a fool to spend a whole lot of time and money porting it.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Websites made entirely with Flash should be killed with fire. It is bad for the user (hard to link/bookmark inside the site) and bad for admins (much more difficult to track usage and maintain). Honestly, I could live without Flash were it not for its video applications. But hopefully people will start using HTML5 for that. As a web developer (programmer, not designer) I also hate working with Flash because it is opaque. You can't make simple updates to content/functionality without loading up the authoring tool and recompiling. Also, it is still an embedded object. It does not interface smoothly with the rest of the page/site.