HTML5: It's Already Everywhere, Even In Mobile

electronic convict writes: Tom Dale has never been shy, and in a Q&A with Matt Asay on ReadWrite, the EmberJS co-founder and JavaScript evangelist makes the outspoken claim that open Web technologies are already everywhere, even in native mobile apps, and that it's only a matter of time before they catch up to "all the capabilities of a native, proprietary platform." Take that, Web-is-dead doomsayers.

Dale has plenty more to say, calling Google an "adolescent behemoth" that's belatedly embracing open-Web technologies in mobile, lauding Apple's Nitro JS engine and belittling the idea that Web apps have to look and feel the same as native apps for the open Web to triumph. His bottom line: "[I]t's not hard to see that the future of the Web on mobile is a happy one."

Comments

Can someone expolain what's so great about HTML?

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

My understanding is that it is still just HTML, but the way some people describe it, it sounds like the second coming of C.

Re:Can someone expolain what's so great about HTML

[ShieldW0lf]

It's less secure than its predecessors, allowing you to do more with it than you could before.

That sounds like a troll, but it's not. A lot of what's billed as innovation in this sphere was thought of by many people before, but the platform was intentionally designed to make it impossible for security reasons.

The wait was unnessesary

[Draugo]

If they would just have based ECMA4 on Actionscript and stuck with it, we would have had all the things we're still missing in javascript long ago. All this complaining about "proprietary" platforms is just depressing. When people complain about the need for plugin player with flash etc. and how Javascript is so much better since you don't need external players I mentally mark them down as idiots. The only difference between Flash and Javascript from running perspective is that every browser has included the Javascript runtime in the form of Javascript parser, if Flash were included in the same way (especially now that it's an open format) there would be zero differences between these two, except that you could use an actually sane programming language instead of one that lacks consistency and has all the hallmarks of homebrew script language.

Re:The wait was unnessesary

[DrXym]

Typescript is similar to Actionscript and compiles down to Javascript. You can do stuff like interfaces, classes, inheritance, compile time typechecking etc. My experience of Typescript is the language is okay but developing it is painful because the tools are awful, particularly for someone coming from a place like Java where IDEs will give instant feedback on errors, code completion, formatting etc. Even stuff like ordering of classes can break the JS even when the TS compiles perfectly.

I would agree with the sentiment that people who think JS (or HTML5) is some panacea for Flash are idiots. Flash was hated primarily because it was TOO popular - sites abused the fuck out of it and multi tabbed browsers sagged under the weight of so many running instances. If JS is abused the same way the performance would be just as bad.

JS is often considered the problem, not the solution to web development. This is why coffeescript, typescript et al exit. Plus a raft of JS libraries like jquery, backbone, underscore, phantom, handlebars etc. to hide the differences or provide basic niceties that JS lacks. Plus the likes of dart, emscripten, GWT and so on which bury JS completely and spit out compiled JS. Plus the recognition from browsers that JS performance sucks and the optimization paths they've implemented (e.g. asm.js). That said, we're almost in a place where 95% of the use cases for Flash are probably achievable in JS. Personally I wish browsers would adopt PNaCl or something similar so code can be compiled and run at near native speeds - skip JS as an intermediate format when it doesn't make sense and just let sites ship bitcode.