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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
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.
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.
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.
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You must be new to the world of programming -- old technology never dies! MWA HA HA HA!!!
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.