HTML5: It's Already Everywhere, Even In Mobile 133
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."
Can someone expolain what's so great about HTML? (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding is that it is still just HTML, but the way some people describe it, it sounds like the second coming of C.
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Sorry that should be HTML5 in the title not HTML.
Re:Can someone expolain what's so great about HTML (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
That pretty much sums up my opinion on it as well. (Score:1)
It wasn't that a lot of these things couldn't be done before, it was that non-realtime media, non-interactive media, and scripted pseudo-interactive media (cgi scripts) should not all be lumped together.
But now all that has been thrown aside and every day one has to wonder just what trick you have no way of auditing is going to pop up in your browser today, be it mundane or nefarious.
Re:That pretty much sums up my opinion on it as we (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [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.
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The real problem is that people *want* to see creative, aesthetically pleasing and different designs when browsing the web.
Speak for yourself. When I browse the web I want different types of information.
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Designers wanted their minimum width columns so there were tables inside tables everywhere!
40em column widths (Score:1)
And when the "designer" wants a 500-pixel maximum width,
the website
looks like this
on the
desktop.
500px for body at a "normal" font size (16px) is 31em. Studies show that column widths wider than about 40em (80 columns) make text harder for most people to read because they end up skipping or repeating lines.
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And you have no idea how many columns of text my web browser is showing. I have a 1920x1200 screen. I'm not so fucking retarded as to maximize my browser window, and that's precisely because I have a 1920x1200 screen. The browser window is usually squarish, and most websites (pre-web2.0 shit) render
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There are too many browsers, too many different screens, and too many physical form factors out there. Just fucking let the browser render the content the way it wants to.
So how should a web site provide a good reading experience the majority, who apparently are "so fucking retarded as to maximize [their] browser window" even on a 1920px-wide screen?
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Gee, if only there were a way to suggest (but not mandate) that the browser render a piece of text in a certain manner. A "style", if you will. The specification of such a "style" might include a maximum width [mozilla.org]. Well, I guess no such thing could ever exist, so in order to format that text the server will need to send a whole pile
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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.
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You don't know anything about me, or how I feel.
Intelligent people tolerate the uncomfortable feeling of ignorance, while stupid people fill the gaps with whatever ridiculous crap pops into their tiny little brains.
Your refusal to acknowledge your own ignorance telegraphs the latter. Might want to do something about that.
Re:Can someone expolain what's so great about HTML (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re: Can someone expolain what's so great about HTM (Score:2)
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
Doesn't sound exactly true anymore now that chips like Kaveri basically allow you to run graphics code on top of the virtual memory circuitry.
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In firefox, you have various options to disable parts of HTML5: ...
webgl.disabled: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... [mozilla.org]
network.websocket.enabled
full-screen-api.enabled
And if there is demand to disable HTML5 for certain websites on a click-to-play basis, either somebody will write an addon or the browser does it already itself. For example getusermedia asks for your permission before giving access to the camera.
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What's the negative security implications of the Canvas tag?
It depends on what you mean by "security".
I cannot use to access your local files.
But I can use it to do bitcoin mining on your GPU.
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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 certainly a lot easier to do cross-platform user interfaces in HTML5 than it is in C.
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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 certainly a lot easier to do cross-platform user interfaces in HTML5 than it is in C.
That's true in any language that includes a UI library, simply because C does not include one.
UI-aside, C is a lot more portable than HTML5 is.
Re:Can someone expolain what's so great about HTML (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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So.. if you are writing for the personal computer something that the user has to see graphically HTML beats C hands down? Utilising a whole software stack that's mostly written in C ,-D
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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.
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That's like comparing apples to peacocks.
Re:Can someone expolain what's so great about HTML (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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When you have a fundamentally unsuitable base structure (i.e the DOM) for what you want to do (rich internet applications), the things you implement to try to make it sane are indeed hacks.
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Closed source (Score:2)
You don't really need "compiled javascript" with the new javascript engines underneath modern browsers.
You do if you want to hinder third parties from analyzing it.
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Compiled JavaScript, you say? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... [wikipedia.org]
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A lot of HTML limitations is also due to the fact that it will need to render on many different platforms. The goal for a correct web app is not to copy your PC app, but stay in the browsers rules and limitations.
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Because most web programmers are retards with goldfish level awareness of the past and don't realize they're trying to reinvent the wheel, only this time with more square. But it's asynchronous (aka cooperative multitasking) so that makes it better, somehow.
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Because most web programmers are retards with goldfish level awareness of the past and don't realize they're trying to reinvent the wheel
No, SVG and canvas are fundamentally different.
SVG is vector-based where canvas is raster-based, SVG elements end up in the DOM which is slower but allows you to do things like attach event handlers, canvas is essentially a bitmap so you're manipulating it at the pixel level which makes it faster but you cannot deal with parts of it at an 'element' level.
Having a bitmap target allows for things like WebGL as well, how would you do WebGL if you only had SVG but not canvas? But it does have drawbacks with not
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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.
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Depends what you do though. Making a mass market customer facing e-commerce website? Yeah, IE9's probably your minimum. Maybe even IE8 for some cases.
Making an internal portal? You probably can go IE11.
Mac-only shop? You can even drop IE now and just go safari/chrome/firefox.
Not as lucky, but you have a dashboard for a marketing or HR system? You probably can mandate IE10 and up. Any company who cannot accommodate that will be stuck on SAP and Oracle anyway.
Making a desktop app with HTML5 stuff? Well, you'r
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Don't get me wrong, the new stuff is great, but it will take years before we can take them for granted.
Vista support ends 2017-04-11 (Score:2)
IE9 is the new IE6 and is here to stay for many years.
"Many" here means just under two and a half. Security updates for Windows Vista end in April 11, 2017, and all versions of desktop Windows newer than Windows Vista support IE 10 or later. And unless you have a substantial audience actually using IE on Windows Vista, you can probably provide a "gracefully degraded" experience for IE 9 and recommend Firefox for the full experience.
Re:Can someone expolain what's so great about HTML (Score:5, Insightful)
You must be new to the world of programming -- old technology never dies! MWA HA HA HA!!!
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By "retire" I mean "not use anymore". Of course, we'll still be stuck supporting the legacy crap for decades to come. Much as we'll be stuck supporting HTML5 when the new shiny comes over the horizon.
Re:Can someone explain what's so great about HTML? (Score:1)
HTML5 introduces several useful features which were poorly implemented with shims in HTML. Example: Canvas element now allows for graphics without a plugin. New input types will _lessen_ the need for Javascript datepickers, field type validation. HTML allows for offline application and data so you can launch web applications offline.
All of this depends on browser support though. Input types are not universally implemented or even clearly specified as to their behavior in specifications. Canvas element glitt
Re:Can someone expolain what's so great about HTML (Score:5, Funny)
because you can make amazing websites like zombocom [html5zombo.com]
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But spinning sh$t is not ADA compliant and will get us sued.
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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
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Fair point, but it only applies for applications which don't inherently require Internet communication.
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Right, because they can't just buy the info from the app owner like everyone else does.
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HTML (4 and earlier) was a messy complicated variant of SGML that nobody really understood and which had no compliant implementations whatsoever, but all browsers supported it well enough for day-to-day use.
To a degree it was replaced by XHTML, which was well-understood and properly implemented across browsers, but had some practical problems for some (the requirement to load a DOM fully before even beginner to render, and the strictness of the syntax and harsh failure mode were not always considered approp
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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 d
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Back in the good old days. We had a data format that was in essence a memory dump of the system
You mean .doc?
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Also, it comes with MAFIAA approved DRM baked into the protocol, yah oppression!
It *is* the next coming of C. (I'm not joking.) (Score:3)
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. Perio
Can someone expolain what's so great about HTML? (Score:1)
Re:Can Someone Explain What's So Great About HTML? (Score:3)
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.
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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.
Apart from BLINK-tags and animated GIFs in neon colors.
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There is nothing great about HTML. There is really nothing great about almost any modern web language/platform.
We've been solving the same problem for the past 20+ years.
It's all just an API
Print text, drawing graphics, networking api, database api.
The issue has never been about anything great, but about somehow getting this API to be supported and adopted across all devices/platforms.
Heck, if we all used Windows, the whole web could have just been activeX controls and we'd have all had the same API as wind
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Well I'll tell you, from the perspective of someone who managed a development team, what the big deal is. It's managing information overload.
Suppose you're maintaining an Android App. No problem, you just need to know Java and the Android SDK, which is very well thought out and amazingly easy to use. Oh, but now we need a server tier to our system. Well, you could learn PHP, but to keep things simple you stick with Java and go Java EE, which is not so hard to learn these days. You decide to use a REST
This video is not available (Score:2)
Youtube has a flashless version (www.youtube.com/html5)
With a lot of the video selection missing, as far as I can tell. Or has the situation changed substantially since January 2013 when a bunch of videos were missing from the HTML5 version of YouTube [askubuntu.com]?
Apple's Nitro JS (Score:1)
Let me tell a joke. Apple in the Enterprise.
Re:Apple's Nitro JS (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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^ Who voted this down? This AC is dead right.
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Punchline: iPhones and iPads
I like it but... (Score:2)
but... operation is not even remotely smooth enough to compete with apps running with native graphics libraries. On Apple or Android. Still too sludgy, the browser implementation still does not implement sufficient concurrency to make it work well.
-Matt
The wait was unnessesary (Score:2, Interesting)
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Actionscript is only a language just like javascript too. Its only the APIs that make Actionscript as powerful as it is. And lot of those are still proprietary.
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That's "prototypal", and it's better in just about every way. (Google classical vs prototypal for an easy intro)
Re:The wait was unnessesary (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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ECMAScript 4 formed the basis of Actionscript 3, so there'd be no need to base ES4 on AS3!
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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.
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Cobol is still alive and well (Score:2)
How many times has it been pronounced dead ?
Analog modems ?
Tubes ?
AM Radio ?
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How many times has it been pronounced dead ?
Never. 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. Over time it will die a natural death as companies fold, and applications are replaced on generic boxen. Redevelopment is costly, and since the Y2K effort, companies are loathed to spend huge sums of money to replace something that works perfectly fine. At some point the cost of running on obsolete hardware and the lack of skills available to sup
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How many times has it been pronounced dead ?
Never.
What to say but wrong ?
http://www.yourdonreport.com/i... [yourdonreport.com]
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... [microfocus.com]
http://www.zdnet.com/cobol-sti... [zdnet.com]
Hell the COBOL 2014 standard is now out.
Re:Cobol is still alive and well (Score:4, Insightful)
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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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.
Re:Cobol is still alive and well (Score:4, Informative)
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.
What's the point of his rant? (Score:2)
Unless, of course, this article was meant to draw attention to Tom Dale (because obviously he needs more attention), and two shitty articles about idiots thinking that web is dead. If that's the case, carry on.
only a matter of time (Score:2)
Yes, the capabilities of browser-based apps will catch up to the desktop very soon now. We've been hearing that for a decade, and yet the browser UI toolkits are still incredibly buggy, not consistent across platforms, with many parts just flat-out poorly designed. Getting the UI of any non-trivial web app working correctly across the 5 major browsers is a fucking nightmare. But ANY DAY NOW all the problems will magically disappear-- that's a ridiculous claim, but what is worse, is all the people claiming a