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Hard Truths About HTML5
snydeq writes "Peter Wayner discusses a number of hard truths Web developers must accept in making the most of HTML5 — especially those who are looking to leverage HTML5 in hopes of unseating native apps. 'The truth is, despite its powerful capabilities, HTML5 isn't the solution for every problem. Its additional features are compelling and will help make Web apps formidable competitors for native apps, but security issues, limitations of local data storage, synchronization challenges, and politics should have us all scaling back our expectations for the spec.'"
Despite the power and awesomeness that is the growing new web environment, the browser is the client and the application runs on the server.
Rich, exciting, thrilling and awesome experiences on the client side be damned, the server, the data and the application should never trust the client. I always thought this was a fundamental reality of the web that everyone knew. But recently, with all this version number craziness we have been seeing of Firefox lately, I have come to realize that there are a lot of lessons that have to be re-learned "the hard way" along the way.
Hard Lesson #1 (for Firefox), don't screw with your users or you won't have them long.
Hard Lesson #2, it's a "browser" and a "standards compliant browser" at that. This will mean it is very replaceable or interchangeable. Don't overestimate your worth to the user. Whatever it takes to see the truth, "the browser is not the thing" ; it's how you get to the thing.
Throughout computer history, we have seen patterns emerge. The computer is too over-loaded, so move computing outward to the desktop. The desktop is too overloaded, so move computing back to the server. The desktop and the server are too overloaded and the IT departments are too burdened and expensive, so move computing "to the cloud!" (aka, someone else's servers) All these changes over time indicate a behavior of aversion -- seeking to avoid a problem. That's all well and good, but it doesn't seem to address the problem on the merits of the situation and is certainly not accepting of reality. That reality is that the data and the services are "the things." There are costs associated with those things and they must be managed. But "the things" are the things and they must be valued and handled appropriately and all the things surrounding "the things" need to be held in perspective.
"Another sad case of a XML brainwashed believer...."
Believer? that implies I merely believe XML is useful. No, sorry, many of us in the real world actually find XML useful. We develop large systems where XML helps no end. I'm sorry that you've never worked on a project where XML has come in useful, but some of us are competent enought o actually use the right tool for the job.
"XSLT, trivial? Have you ever tried doing anything useful with it?"
Yes thanks. We had an old black box system that we needed to integrate with a new web based system, it produced web pages that were thankfully at least XHTML1 compliant. Because we couldn't yet get rid of this system we were fortunately able to XSLT transform the output into useful data, and feed back inputs to it to transparently integrate it with the new system. If it had only adhered to HTML5's bastardised SGML syntax then it would've been a nightmare to integrate with this legacy system.
"XML/XHTML was written for the parsers. HTML5 was written for web developers. You may say the standard is "shit", the practices are "amateurish" (when benchmarked against what they teach you in the textbooks), but all that counts is what people are able to do with the stuff."
Right, and this is the problem. Too many developers haven't come from a professional background. They write code that would make old school C++ developers, and high end Java developers alike cry themselves to sleep at night. They managed to get a basic site working in PHP once, and have moved on from their, they don't understand what MVC or OOP is and don't see why they should because they never needed it so just carry on as normal. The problem is, they're also the ones who are responsible for sites that are always falling over, getting hacked, miserably hopeless in terms of scalability. Stuff isn't put into textbooks for a laugh, or to give you something to study, it's put in there base on experience, it's put in there so that you don't repeat the mistakes made by others before you - and there's the problem, too many web developers do repeat those mistakes time and time again, which is why things like SQL injection and XSS attacks are some of the most common to this day, despite solutions to them being long available and known, well, if you read the textbooks that is.
"Theoretical aesthetic purity is not an ends in itself. The "separation of concerns", "removal of arbitrary tags/duplicate functionality", "future proof" stuffs actually make the XML/XHTML spec more useless, harder to work with, and decreases productivity. You may marvel at its aesthetic beauty, but for people like us who actually need to do things on a schedule, those restrictions hinder our productivity when there's no way to opt out of it."
You are a terribly developer. Sorry, it needs to be said. You've basically admitted you're writing terrible code just to get something working. Your code is the type of code responsible for nightmarish maintainability, horrendous bugs and security exploits. Please, get the fuck out of the software development industry now. We don't need more bad software. I understand that in some places the constraints are such that speed of development and hence reduced cost is put well over and above quality but that's not the same everywhere. Please don't assume your complete lack of focus on quality is universal.
"For example, if people use bold text all the time, then why shouldn't we be able to bold-text? Why should we have to , or worse, write up a crazy "semantic" document and then add the XLST? Isn't that overkill?"
It depends. Sure it might take you an extra 5 minutes today, but that's 5 hours saved tommorrow when you have to come back and fix things. Separating off semantics means that for larger software teams you can even have people dedicated to looking after just that, so the developers can focus on developing, without getting in each other's way.
"The HTML spec people took 10 years to realize the mistake of going the XML way. It seems that you still
Just wait until we get the ultimate XML programming language.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.