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Web Technologies Need an Owner

joehewitt.com

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Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#41

Post by wavephorm »

I think he is underestimating the quantum leap that web technologies have made in the past 2 years.

Between canvas, audio & audio data, video tag, css3, websockets, webworkers, webgl, touchscreen events, and new server tech like nodejs... there are now so many new API's to learn and work with that most web developers haven't even started to catch up yet. There's a lot of room here, the capabilities of the permutations of these technologies together will take years to fully realize. It will take years to write libraries to build the power-features necessary to really take this stuff to the next level.

The power to build a amazing new apps is now here. It took 10 years for this leap to happen. Just give it some time for web developers to catch up.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#42

Post by epe »

joehewitt wrote: post #31
mapgrep wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the word "never" saves you from having to state when the web ceases to be the dominant platform. When do you think this will be? Something like "the web will never be the dominant platform, except for the past 10 years and the next 10 years" does lack a certain punch, but at least it would be specific :-) (And I appreciate your taking the time to write your blog post, and don't want to be a jerk, but the defini…

You're right, it's not the best sentence I've written in my life. Thanks for the feedback. I was trying to convey that the web is always going to have to fight for its survival, contrary to the common assumption that the web has some magical properties that ensure its long-term prominence.

Agreed that the web doesn't have any "magical properties", but it has the "Worse is Better" survival characteristic; or at least it did in its early days. I think the web's continued dominance depends on the extent to which it retains those characteristics.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#43

Post by dangoor »

joehewitt wrote: post #34
dangoor wrote: post #19

While there are a couple of minor bits I agree with, overall I think Joe's off on this one. The web has five organizations pushing really hard on it at this point (Mozilla [my employer], Google, Apple, Microsoft and Opera). The web almost had HP. We'll see what happens with WebOS. The one part of his article that I somewhat agree with is that under the guidance of several entities (and lots and lots of people) the we…

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. I…

They had data binding? I don't remember that (that's a pet feature of mine ;)

From what I've seen, things don't really start in the committees. They start with people at browser vendors scratching their own itches and eventually escape out into the committees. In some ways, that's why it's good that there are 5 organizations pushing forward. One with an itch for camera access will help force the others to take action.

Data binding aside, I do remember the mid- to late-90s and I think the pace is faster now. Perhaps I'm biased since I work for a browser vendor... but I'm not actually a browser developer myself. I'm a web developer. And, I see interesting new capabilities popping up pretty rapidly.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#44

Post by groby_b »

joehewitt wrote: post #33
groby_b wrote: post #26

It's kind of amusing to read an article complaining about the walled garden of Facebook, and at the same time demanding central ownership for web technology. It's not only a possibility that a centralized web will be bad, it's inevitable. A central owner has _no_ incentive for improvement. The only reason e.g. Cocoa keeps improving is because it needs to compete.

Has Linux stopped improving? Has Python stopped improving? Has jQuery stopped improving? It all depends on who the owner is.

Linux doesn't own the OS market - far from it. Python doesn't own the language sector. jQuery doesn't own the JS library sector. They are all independent projects, and it's _good_ for them to have a BDFL.

Asking for one for the entire web is not a good plan because it would exclude competition. That's where the flaw in the argument is.

And while it'd be nice if browser vendors could just go off and improve along (from a browser vendor's point of view), it absolutely sucks for every single developer and the users. Surely, you remember "this website runs only on...". This is exactly what you see in the apps market - applications only running on certain devices, locking in the users. Sure, for you as a developer it's convenient. For users, it's a bad idea.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#45

Post by angryasian »

freemarketteddy wrote: post #15

Truth hurts doesnt it! I think Joe is spot on.The web is already miles behind native mobile platforms.Personally I can vouch for iOS.The kind of stuff you can do on iOS now just in terms of UI is just impossibly hard to do with HTML5 or any other web platform. But then if you think about it.Its not surprising at all.Of course you will have a much more power on a native platform than a web platform which is built on t…

just wondering what you consider is impossibly hard to do is ?

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#46

Post by ceejayoz »

wavephorm wrote: post #41

I think he is underestimating the quantum leap that web technologies have made in the past 2 years. Between canvas, audio & audio data, video tag, css3, websockets, webworkers, webgl, touchscreen events, and new server tech like nodejs... there are now so many new API's to learn and work with that most web developers haven't even started to catch up yet. There's a lot of room here, the capabilities of the permutation…

Interesting point. XMLHTTPRequest was out in 1999, but it took until 2005 for it to really catch on with Google Maps etc. coming out.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#47

Post by ootachi »

joehewitt wrote: post #33
groby_b wrote: post #26

It's kind of amusing to read an article complaining about the walled garden of Facebook, and at the same time demanding central ownership for web technology. It's not only a possibility that a centralized web will be bad, it's inevitable. A central owner has _no_ incentive for improvement. The only reason e.g. Cocoa keeps improving is because it needs to compete.

Has Linux stopped improving? Has Python stopped improving? Has jQuery stopped improving? It all depends on who the owner is.

Python pretty much has stopped improving; the world is still largely on Python 2.x. In fact, there was a highly-publicized moratorium on new features that lasted for a long time.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#48

Post by dangoor »

joehewitt wrote: post #34
dangoor wrote: post #19

While there are a couple of minor bits I agree with, overall I think Joe's off on this one. The web has five organizations pushing really hard on it at this point (Mozilla [my employer], Google, Apple, Microsoft and Opera). The web almost had HP. We'll see what happens with WebOS. The one part of his article that I somewhat agree with is that under the guidance of several entities (and lots and lots of people) the we…

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. I…

I realize that my reply didn't address the fact that camera access took a long time. You're right... I don't think it's because of a boneheaded committee, though. I'm just guessing, because I have nothing to do with this directly, but I'm guessing that people either:

1. weren't really thinking that the web needed camera access 2. thought there were higher priority things

And yes, Flash had camera access first. How's that working out for them relative to web technologies?

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#49

Post by joehewitt »

dangoor wrote: post #36
nupark2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one part of his article that I somewhat agree with is that under the guidance of several entities (and lots and lots of people) the web may not have quite the same coherence as, say, Cocoa. I'm not sure that will be a problem. 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 t…

"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 HTM…

Yeah, the checklist of web technologies is getting longer, but that's only part of the solution. They don't all work together very well. For example, Alex Russell has been opining recently about the way DOM interfaces are awkwardly adapted to JavaScript due to the committee's insistence on targetting IDL. That's why the W3C could never have invented jQuery.

I've been trying to duplicate native scrolling in iOS recently and I'm getting killed by details that the specifications don't cover and WebKit authors don't document. For example, tons of trial and error uncovered the fact that CSS keyframes animations are unusable for elements wider than 1024 pixels, due likely to OpenGL issues on iOS. If the W3C and WebKit had any clue how developers would actually use the stuff they design, they would have made this fact clear by at least providing a way to query the optimal texture size used under the covers.

Over and over you find little examples like this which demonstrate that the web's "leadership" is completely disconnected from reality on the ground.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#50

Post by earl »

Isn't this similar to what happened with opengl (industry consortium, no clear driver) vs directx (ms owns; highly motivated; actually pretty decent a couple revs in)? Carmack seems to now find DirectX superior [1]. Note I'm not a graphics programmer so this is just my superficial understanding of the matter.

The quote from AMD's dev relations manager is damning: "AMD's GPU worldwide developer relations manager, Richard Huddy, agrees. He added that the actual innovation in graphics has been driven by Microsoft in the last ten or so years. 'OpenGL has largely been tracking that, rather than coming up with new methods,' he said. 'The geometry shader, for example, which came in with Vista and DirectX 10, is wholly Microsoft's invention in the first place.'" [1 also]

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/john-Carmack-DirectX-OpenGL...

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