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Web Technologies Need an Owner

joehewitt.com

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Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#71

Post by daleharvey »

kkowalczyk wrote: post #54
dangoor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

It's not enough to list the things that web does well. There are many areas in which web hasn't caught with capabilities available for a decade in Windows or Mac Just one example that is particularly painful for me: it's still impossible to build a high quality code editing component on web platform. There are many valiant attempts but none that approaches the speed, quality and convenience of the best desktop editor…

> Just one example that is particularly painful for me: it's still impossible to build a high quality code editing component on web platform. There are many valiant attempts but none that approaches the speed, quality and convenience of the best desktop editors from 10 years ago.

Cloud9 and nide are really pretty competent editors, just because someone hasnt built the one application in a way that satisfies you does not mean the platform is dying.

> Another one: you can't build an ssh client as a web page because there is not enough socket support. You can do it by going through your own proxy, but that's not secure from the user point of view (you could spy on his traffic without the user knowing it).

CORS is supported in all modern browsers

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#72

Post by Me1000 »

dangoor wrote: post #48
joehewitt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For years Flash held a dominate position on the web. Without Flash YouTube who knows how long it would have taken for something like YouTube to be created? That stagnation is a fundamental problem.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#73

Post by braindead_in »

Why can't it be both native and web apps sharing the application space together? Each have their own strengths and one does not necessarily have to dominate over the other. There will always be use cases where a native app makes more sense and vice-verse. There is enough depth and breadth in the applications domain to allow both of them to thrive.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#74

Post by tlianza »

One thing these discussions seem to be slipping into is "the web" vs. "native" while skipping the fact that "native" is not a thing, it's a collection of (competing!) things... and they all also run web apps.

Until one native platform captures more usage than the browser, which is impossible unless platforms start to drop the browser, the web will by definition be dominant if dominance is measured by addressable market.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#75

Post by tlianza »

wf wrote: post #24
dangoor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who needs to imagine? That's how it was a decade ago.

Well, I'm only 22 and we didn't even have a computer until I was around 12, so my experience with web standards is relatively naive. I <3 the internet as it is today, and I at least, do have to imagine how atrocious it must have been with Microsoft setting the standard.

This is a good reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_explorer#OS_compatibil...

IE 4.0 was a revelation and IE 5.0 was fantastic as well - effectively it was death knell for Netscape and all competition (earned MS a monopoly suit, but in truth it was a vastly superior browser to anything out there).

They won the browser war. Then, check out the time difference between IE6 and IE7. 5 years. That's where innovation goes absent credible competition.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#76

Post by tlianza »

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…

> In my opinion in the future you will have a browser and type in a url but a native app will open in the browser window.These native apps will be built for different platforms.The web app will be shown by default if a native app hasnt been developed for that platform.

That's basically the present, where sites detect your platform and prompt you to install an app if they wrote one. Is it so great? Are we going to write HTML/JS, Objective-C, Java, and C# versions of all of our apps?

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#77

Post by mapgrep »

nupark2 wrote: post #25
mapgrep wrote: post #10

"Let's face facts: the Web will never be the dominant platform." Hewitt's post hinges on that statement, presented without supporting evidence. But actually the Web is already dominant among the platforms Hewitt mentions (Web, Windows, iOS, and Android). Relevant stats: Web - 1.7 billion users as of July, given that 880 million people go to the single busiest website publicly measured by Google, and this site has a "…

You're conflating hyperlinked documents and applications. The web is clearly the dominant document platform, but is the web the dominant application platform? The answer is in market success of the emerging mobile (and possibly desktop) application platforms, and the kinds of applications being produced there.

Just follow the link I provided to the top 1000 most visited sites on the web http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/

Social network, video host, web portal, search, portal, mass collaboration software, and only at #7 do we get to a blog platform - arguably a "hyperlinked document" server, though really more of a an application -- followed by search, software, portal, search, search, software, classifieds, messaging, video, search -- the vast majority of the top 100 page are non document oriented apps.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#78

Post by yuhong »

randomdata wrote: post #35
philikon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because when Microsoft was the only browser vendor, the web evolved really quickly... OWAIT

But was the browser monoculture to blame? The web went through a painful stale period from about 2000 to 2005, during which time IE asserted near total dominance. However, sites are just now starting to phase out IE6 support. That means that the technology that has advanced the web over the past five or so years was there all along. Interest in the web started to return around the same time Firefox started to gain in…

>However, sites are just now starting to phase out IE6 support.

All this proves is that the IE6 monoculture had such an effect that it took a long time for the effects to disappear. But yes IE4 and particularly IE5.x introduced a lot of new stuff that did not become well known until years later, like the infamous XMLHTTPRequest.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#79

Post by bad_user »

nupark2 wrote: post #64
InclinedPlane wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In user-hours of application use the web is UNQUESTIONABLY the dominant application platform.

I'm not sure why you'd say 'unquestionably,' short of a very loose definition of what makes an application. People spend 8 hours a day using desktop apps -- word, excel, outlook, GIS software, development tools, whatever. They read their email and twitter and consume content throughout the day on their mobile devices. At home they play video games, read books, comics, videos -- all using 'apps' on their TVs, mobile d…

I migrated from Thunderbird to GMail, and from Word/Excel to Google apps.

The only desktop apps I'm still using, besides development tools and the actual browser, is a PDF reader + Skype + iTunes + the file manager + Gimp / Photoshop for editing my personal pictures (before uploading them to Flickr).

On my Android phone I use native apps for online services, mostly because bandwidth is a problem and native apps have better caching. But the web interfaces for Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are actually usable.

I'm not saying that everything should or will move to the web. It would actually be stupid implementing Photoshop in the browser.

But the web is clearly dominating my time spent with computers.

Re: Web Technologies Need an Owner

#80

Post by freemarketteddy »

angryasian wrote: post #45
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 ?

Check out the pulse app or the flipboard app or even the twitter app for the ipad!....its hard to even come close to the UIs of these apps on web platforms!..although Joe is doing some cool work on that front!
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