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Can Web Standards Make Mobile Apps Obsolete? (arstechnica.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the better-web dept.

nerdyalien writes: There's a litany of problems with apps. There is the platform lock-in and the space the apps take up on the device. Updating apps is a pain that users often ignore, leaving broken or vulnerable versions in use long after they've been allegedly patched. Apps are also a lot of work for developers—it's not easy to write native apps to run on both Android and iOS, never mind considering Windows Phone and BlackBerry. What's the alternative? Well, perhaps the best answer is to go back to the future and do what we do on desktop computers: use the Web and the Web browser.

3 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. no by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    no

  2. Better Web Standards Needed by nateman1352 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't know about everyone else, but IMHO the web browser is THE WORST platform to code for in existence. It amazes and depresses me how little has changed about client side web programming since IE4. Instead we have created these huge frameworks to try to hide the suck under an enormous pile of middleware. But still we are doing this fundamentally broken thing of shoehorning a language intended to describe formatted text documents (HTML) to instead describe a GUI for an application. This reminds me of IE4 and its web page dialogs.

    If we truly are serious about having the web be an application platform then a new markup intended to describe cross platform application GUIs and a standard bytecode for the web is needed. Asm.js and enscripten or PNaCl both could be our new standard bytecode, both have pros and cons that I won't rehash. Honestly I'm not a huge fan of either one. But no one is trying to address the fact that HTML's layout system is designed for documents... Not for GUIs. We really need something like XUL or XAML made in to a web standard. I don't care about the politics of what language/tool we choose as long as its a good one thats open for all. I'm sick of the holy wars over tools and languages. That said JavaScript is garbage just like HTML and CSS for actual development and needs to be replaced with a sane language.

  3. O RLY? by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 5, Informative

    it's not easy to write native apps to run on both Android and iOS, never mind considering Windows Phone and BlackBerry

    apparently you haven't heard of Qt because it supports all of those platforms.

    --
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