Web Technologies Need an Owner

I clearly stated you need more than just a single owner, you need a single owner that is competent and cares. We can't just snap our fingers and have that, but I'm hoping to at least help people to start thinking about it.

It didn't take a seer to imagine that having camera access was a good idea, but it takes a pretty boneheaded committee to wait this long to do it. Hell, Adobe put camera access in Flash years before iOS even existed. I don't love Flash, but even they benefitted from have a single owner.

Lots of good things coming to the platform now, but progress was even faster in the mid-90's when Netscape and IE were growing up. IE4 and IE5 in particular had a lot of great features that have since been forgotten, and are only now being reconsidered for standardization. Remember behaviors, image filters, CSS expressions, and data binding?

"It's already a problem. In fact, it is the problem. The web application 'platform' is poor, incoherent, and its proponents highly resistant to the sweeping changes that would be necessary to compete with a native, proprietary platform like iOS."

Which "sweeping changes" are those?

Changes like the ability to draw pixel-by-pixel? Vectors? 3D? (Canvas/svg/webgl)

Changes like higher level form controls? Got some in HTML5. New component model is under discussion now. Better layout of controls? The flexible box model helps a great deal, is already in lots of shipping browsers and is getting further cleaned up now.

Drag and drop? Yep.

How about the automatic data binding that's so cool in Cocoa? Not only are there application frameworks that do this (SproutCore, Knockout, Batman), there are also proposals like "Model Driven Views" (MDV) which use ECMAScript Harmony Proxy objects to make it cleaner.

What about files? Yeah, there are file APIs. Databases? localStorage is a simple key/value store. There's also WebSQL DB and IndexedDB which will hopefully be resolved in one way or another soon.

APIs for audio and geolocation are there now. Camera and other device APIs are in the works.

So, which sweeping changes do you mean? The ability to compile C code? Sorry, but I don't think most apps need that.

"The browser makers (especially Mozilla) seem insistent on leaving us in the lurch, stuck with JavaScript, the DOM, and the painfully long lead times of standardization."

I can't say this for sure, but I'd be willing to bet that:

a. standardization is moving faster than it has in more than a decade b. many APIs become usable in the real world well before the standards are complete

To be sure, the web-as-a-platform is not perfect today or in the future. But, its evolution is real.

I disagree that the web tech should be owned by a company. It seems to me the "committee" has done a much better job the Microsoft alone, so far.

But if there was to be such company, it should clearly be Google. Both Apple and Microsoft don't really have their interests aligned with the web. They make money from hardware or from selling OS licenses. By default, that means that their #1 priority is to do that - and in many cases at the expense of the web. If they would own it, and they would ever have a conflict of interest between the web and their main platform, they would choose their main platform.

But Google have their interests much more aligned with the web. They care about making the web faster, more advanced, and so on, because they indirectly make money from that.

But of course, even Google owning the tech would bring it's own set of problems, and this will happen with any company owning it. Any company who would own it would "corrupt" it in some way, if only to be better for their own products or less good for the others.

That's why the Internet is decentralized in many ways, and it's the beauty of the Internet. We've had many closed platforms before, but none like the Internet. And the Internet is the greatest one by far, and I doubt it's by coincidence.

If you look at other "cross-platform" technologies, like Flash for example, they ultimately fail, because a single owner can't make sure it works on absolutely every platform and browsers, with no problems. It requires too much work.

And again, that's one of the beauties of the web technologies, that every browser has to do their own implementation of the spec as good as possible, and compete with each other for that.

One more thing. Yes, iOS and Android did help bring back to popularity the native applications, but this is not an "ultimate" win. It's just a cycle. We've had native apps when the PC's emerged, then we had web-apps becoming popular. Then the smartphones emerged with slow processors (compared to PC's) and native apps started being popular again. But HTML5 is already starting to become popular on mobiles, and with at least 3-4 platforms, you can be sure the web will "win", at least this cycle, until a new low-performance tech comes along and native apps are back.

I disagree that the web tech should be owned by a company. It seems to me the "committee" has done a much better job than Microsoft alone, so far.

But if there was to be such company, it should be Google. Both Apple and Microsoft don't really have their interests aligned with the web. They make money from hardware or from selling OS licenses. By default, that means that their #1 priority is to do that - and in many cases at the expense of the web. If they would own it, and they would ever have a conflict of interest between the web and their main platform, they would choose their main platform.

But Google have their interests much more aligned with the web. They care about making the web faster, more advanced, and so on, because they indirectly make money from that.

But of course, even Google owning the tech would bring its own set of problems, and this will happen with any company owning it. Any company who would own it would "corrupt" it in some way, if only to be better for their own products or less good for the others.

That's why the Internet is decentralized in many ways, and it's the beauty of the Internet. We've had many closed platforms before, but none like the Internet. And the Internet is the greatest one by far, and I doubt it's by coincidence.

If you look at other "cross-platform" technologies, like Flash for example, they ultimately fail, because a single owner can't make sure it works on absolutely every platform and browsers, with no problems. It requires too much work.

And again, that's one of the beauties of the web technologies, that every browser has to do their own implementation of the spec as good as possible, and compete with each other for that.

I don't think you can do something "cross-platform" without having all the players involved, or as many as possible. How do you ensure the needs of every platform are met? Will Google care about Microsoft's needs for the web? Would Microsoft make HTML specs that take advantage of Apple's hardware? This is why you have a "standards body". Because otherwise the standard would be whatever that company needs and wants from the web.

One more thing. Yes, iOS and Android did help bring back to popularity the native applications, but this is not an "ultimate" win. It's just a cycle. We've had native apps when the PC's emerged, then we had web-apps becoming popular. Then the smartphones emerged with slow processors (compared to PC's) and native apps started being popular again. But HTML5 is already starting to become popular on mobiles, and with at least 3-4 platforms, you can be sure the web will "win", at least this cycle, until a new low-performance tech comes along and native apps are back.