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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."
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."
My understanding is that it is still just HTML, but the way some people describe it, it sounds like the second coming of C.
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.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
It's basically just a bunch of new features that are wrapped up into a bundle with the label "version 5" slapped on it. It's usually accompanied by CSS3, which adds new features for styling stuff.
There are two reasons people like HTML5, in my experience. Firstly, the canvas element lets you do arbitrary drawing with javascript, opening up a large range of applications for pure-HTML that used to rely on stuff like Flash or Applets (most notably games). Secondly, HTML5 does a lot of stuff natively, that used to have to be added (somewhat hackishly) by javascript and UI libraries - form validation, colour pickers, date selectors. When you add CSS3 into the mix, you can make quite rich UIs with very little (if any) use of javascript.
Basically, HTML5 will let us retire a whole bunch of crufty old legacy hacks from the bad days (Javascript everywhere, Flash, Applets, etc)
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
because you can make amazing websites like zombocom
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.
but the platform was intentionally designed to make it impossible for security reasons.
Perhaps thats true for some technologies, but as user agents didn't add those features to the web, all of those shiny features landed in flash or silverlight and ended up being less secure and more broken than before. Soon every website told you to install flash because it was so new and so cool.
So browser vendors had the choice: either add the features to the browsers themselfes, or rely on one company (Adobe, silverlight came later) and their "Browser inside a Browser".
Of course HTML5 is less secure, and especially WebGL allows the web (traditionally a very dangerous place) to access the graphics card without a dense safety net. But otherwise you would have unity web player or other technologies, which are basically punching holes exactly there where you build your safety net.
HTML5 isn't less secure because people wanted it to be less secure. They wanted to obsolete plugins, but still meet the Web's users demands. Do you have flash installed?
While I somewhat agree with your statement let me just add the fact that "The Enterprise" is a joke. The word "Enterprise" in the software world automatically means "expensive and poorly built, unmaintanable garbage with vendor lockin". Maybe "Java" too but the "enterprise" tag already stinks like shit so adding more shit to it doesn't make it any shittier really.
For example, the article on readwriteweb does nothing if Javashit is disabled, yet it's just a static piece of text with some images and could have been just as effectively rendered in HTML 3.0 like any other motherfuckingwebsite.com.
Sad thing is, HTML 3.0 is more responsive than most of the shit I see today. HTML 3.0 used to just wrap words at the end of the screen or the window, no matter what the "designer" wanted. Now, when the "designer" wants a 6-inch minimum width, the text is unreadable on mobile unless you're willing to scroll back and forth for EVERY FUCKING LINE OF TEXT. And when the "designer" wants a 500-pixel maximum width,
the website
looks like this
on the
desktop.
Fuck web design. Fuck web designers. And increasingly, fuck the web.
UI-aside, C is a lot more portable than HTML5 is.
Sure if you're writing embedded applications, backend server programs or scientific computing applications HTML5 is probably not the best choice but if you're talking end-user facing programs then it's going to be portable across all the major (and most of the minor) platforms.
No that's basically it.
Long story short, HTML5 came about around the same time as the rise of hipsters, the type of people who produce crappy little "artsy" indie games that we're supposed to give a toss about but don't because they're crap, you know the type of person I'm talking about, people like Phil Fish.
So all these people that really don't have much of a clue about technology but can now "create" think it's a magical new thing, something incredible and amazing.
But in reality anyone with any degree of technical competence recognises HTML5 for what it is- it's one step forward, and two steps back, parts of the spec are just outright broken, the semantic tags being a prime example. The set of semantic tags is so small and already outdated and the description so ambiguous and explanations from the spec writers so contradictory amongst even themselves that people use them in different ways meaning it's anyone's guess what their semantics actually are in practice- you can ascertain no more information about the content contained within than you could when everything was a div with a genuinely descriptive id or class.
You've now basically got all the crap you had with Flash as standard but without being able to disable the plugin to kill it and with even worse performance and less accessibility.
So yes the HTML5 fanboys who are mostly non-technical hipsters may call it the second coming of C, but if you instead view it as the second coming of the AOL homepage it makes far more sense.
How many times has it been pronounced dead ?
Never.
What to say but wrong ?
http://www.yourdonreport.com/i...
Really if you haven't been around do a little searching for yourself. I have been hearing that COBOL is dead since the 80s.
But as a development language it is most certainly dead. COBOL is only used in very old legacy applications invariably centered around finance and big iron.
I guess you didn't know COBOL has been enjoying a resurgence ? It has a very nice niche for cloud applications, you know those CLIENT/SERVER type apps.
http://www.microfocus.com/asse...
http://www.zdnet.com/cobol-sti...
Hell the COBOL 2014 standard is now out.
So.. if you are writing for the personal computer something that the user has to see graphically HTML beats C hands down?
Not necessarily.
Utilising a whole software stack that's mostly written in C ,-D
Yes, most higher level languages run on platforms written in C, that doesn't mean C is the perfect language for everything.
Back in the good old days. We had a data format that was in essence a memory dump of the system. So the data will only work with one application and sometimes on the same OS and hardware (Endianness).
Then we started to get some open format solutions such as Postscript, LaTex which allowed for cross platform and software sharing of data. HTML got popular mostly due to it compatibility with flat text. Simple commands and the fact that you could link to an other document. This linking feature ment you could dig further in a document.
They added more features including images more formatting then JavaScript was a bit of a hack added in for client side processing.
So now we have apps that we access online and we really don't care if you are using windows, macs, tablets, phones, or plan9. The browser follows the standard and gives you the output.
Java was an attempt at this concept too, hovever many apps that we call webpages today would be too much work to code in Java.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The only way COBOL might die a natural death is if the biggest companies in the world all fold, without any of their IT assets being sold at liquidation.
Given that the value of those assets is easily in the hundreds of millions of dollars for large companies, it's a bit unlikely.
COBOL will out live anybody reading (or writing) this comment.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Well that is all and good but IE does not support any of the new input types, the new minimum browser supported for most people is now IE9, which does have canvas and SVG, but is missing a bunch of stuff like input types and CSS gradients. IE9 is the new IE6 and is here to stay for many years.
You must be new to the world of programming -- old technology never dies! MWA HA HA HA!!!
My understanding is that it is still just HTML, but the way some people describe it, it sounds like the second coming of C.
It is the next coming of C.
The moment the portable devices became web capable - and the web back then already was where most people spent their time when computing - was when the iPhone was introduced. A full-blown non-sucking modern browser on a fully mobile pocket device that the entire world wanted. That was a first. And Steve Jobs said: No,it won't run flash or any other VM. Period.
This eventually killed Flash and pushed *everyone* in the rich client field back to Ajax, HTML and CSS. At the same time browsers became more performant, Google open sourced their acqired V8 engine and moved every thinkable app into the cloud.
FFW to today, 7 years Anno iPhone, and we have a bazillion online devices (classic Desktops, laptops, netbooks/ultrabooks, tablets and smartphones) with nothing but am HTML5 browser that runs JavaScript in common. Google will defend the(ir) web with all their might and they plan to bring the second half of humanity online - with the help of Huawei, Xiaoming and friends. And they're already doing it with a notable pace.
And the devices doing this are so powerfull, they'd run circles around an 80ies liquid nitro cooled Supercomputer. Hence rich clients in pure open standard web technologies is where *everything* that matters in utility and end-user computing today happens. That's a simple fact. Performance be damned, we have 4-8 cores running at 1.x Ghz on even the cheapest of mobile devices. So, yeah, every advancement in the field is a big deal. Web Components, for instance, are a huge step forward. (Google for "Polymer")
And why are web based rich client apps such a big deal, you ask?
From the top of my head:
No deployment, continuous integration, port 80 is always open, no fussing with customers inhouse IT, runs on everything that runs on electricity and has a screen with zero porting. And probably then some reasons.
(Sidenote: That's why we today even have tons of SCADA equipment that runs mission-critical stuff accesible to every highschool kid who can dig up the default password.)
Bottom line:
You got it just right: The web and HTML5 centric frontends actually are the next coming of C.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
with it's payed developer program. Why they h*ll do we need to pay $75 bucks to be able to put some stuff on our phone that we own.
You don't. You have a choice to choose another platform or to even jailbreak it. It's actually fairly smart of Apple to do that as it keeps down the cruft, is easier for reviewers to wade through the submissions and arguably makes for a better experience for the end user since most are not developers themselves. But Android has more marketshare/eyeballs and a more open platform. Your beef isn't with Apple, it's with your own decision to choose that platform.
Yeah, well, you go write an enterprise level application using modal windows and IFRAMES to do your AJAX calls, then see how impressed you are when people talk about how "innovative" web apps are.
HTML5 is really about pushing pervasive DRM.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Seeing as it has nothing to do with static documents, yeah - It's fine. You really do sound upset. Did HTML5 touch you inappropriately or something? Hint: Because a document can be static doesn't mean it has to always be static. The DOM is perfectly capable of being modified at runtime, and as AngularJS and other frameworks show, is capable of being utilised in some incredibly well-thought-out ways, making rapid (and sane) web-based app development possible. Or I guess you're right and that simply isn't the case... Muppet.
SVG relies on markup, whereas Canvas is entirely code-oriented. SVG is also vector based (hence the name), and Canvas is raster based, which lend them to different things. Canvas also has 3D support, which SVG does not have. Of course people like slashdice assume there is no difference and will use that as ammunition to "take on" HTML5 and try to seem quietly versed on the subject, but their missing knowledge just highlights that their argument isn't from a position of understanding, but a reaction to something else - maybe just not understanding it? I don't know, it's weird.
While being kept on life support by those who still care is definitely alive, I wouldn't say well for any of those. They're all in a long tail phase of life where those who still use them won't change unless forced, but basically nothing new is being done with them so the user and support bases will slowly dwindle until it truly is dead.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
I don't know about modems - they do have their uses (getting around internet censorship - interestingly because things like FidoNet generally are uncensored because they take place through phone calls). Short hauls are more likely point to point WiFi or Ethernet.
Tubes still have a purpose - high power amplification and switching where even modern semiconductors perform poorly. If you're a radio station with even moderate power, your finals are most likely going to be a tube because high power semiconductors are not only extremely expensive, perform worse, and you'll need a lot more of them, they don't last as long and have troublesome requirements.
AM radio also has its uses - besides being extremely easy to demodulate without a power source, AM transmissions have characteristics that are superior to FM, which is why aircraft use AM to communicate. FM communications suffer from the "capture" effect, where the strongest signal is the one demodulated by the receiver - weaker signals simply disappear. AM signals though, if you step on someone else, the receiver knows it (the receiver squeals). It's not all useless - if you have a powerful transmitter, you can still "break through" the noise to be understood (ATC towers generally transmit on the order of hundreds of watts, while an aircraft is on the order of tens of watts). However, the ability to detect a collision is extremely important and that's inherent in the AM system. FM systems don't have collision detection mechanisms and can lead to dangerous situations if someone steps in at the wrong time.
I can tell you what was great about HTML 2. You didn't have a bunch of annoying shit going on in a web page.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped