Flipboard addresses the accessibility issue in their article. While moving to canvas limits it for now, at least they are making an effort to incorporate it, which is more than can be said for most sites.
Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
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Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#12From the Flipboard page: > You cannot build a 60fps scrolling list view with DOM. I simply do not believe that. I have no problems scrolling around the internet. And the examples they give (flipboard.com/@flipboard) give me no clue about what their problem with the DOM is. I find it really hard to imagine you couldn't do that in the DOM. I wonder what is going on over there.
Their use model is specifically on mobile devices, and it is certainly true that many sites run absolutely abysmally on smartphones/tablets. While these devices are powerful, they're still weak compared to most of our desktop machines.
Flipboard spent an enormous amount of effort making a rendering to canvas platform, humorously to allow an "open" option aside from their app (which makes the complaint about it in the submission rather perplexing). I suspect they did a lot of analysis. And the DOM is notoriously slow, one of the reasons being that it is now a catch all/everything and the sink platform that has an enormous number of modifiers -- the flexibility that we hail is also what leads to engine slowdown. We need a new, simpler layout standard that simplifies all of the various sidepaths and diversions that got built into the standard.
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#13True - and hopefully you'll keep that up with your new site/app once marketers, CFOs, and investors get involved, I think that's when things start growing walls and controls. As soon as someone mentions "monetization," hopefully it's only explored as charging your users a reasonable rate for a good service.
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#14So we should never create anything new, then?
No. You just must build your new things in such ways that your competitors can easily repeat them and your customers can easily migrate to your competitors.
How does replying to a service via email, make the service easy to repeat / vulnerable to competitors? It's just an additional feature.
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#15From the Flipboard page: > You cannot build a 60fps scrolling list view with DOM. I simply do not believe that. I have no problems scrolling around the internet. And the examples they give (flipboard.com/@flipboard) give me no clue about what their problem with the DOM is. I find it really hard to imagine you couldn't do that in the DOM. I wonder what is going on over there.
You cannot build a 60fps scrolling list view with a DOM.
Can't complain; their results do look gorgeous.
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#16So we should never create anything new, then?
I think the author is trying to say that we should build products on top of established, open standards. Or, where applicable and within reason, we should integrate them into our product. Allows our users to more easily integrate our products into their existing workflows.
AFAIK canvas is an open standard. the OP is like someone criticizing a website that chose to use canvas over svg to display graphs,because canvas isn't accessible. It has nothing to do with using Open standards or not.
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#17Perhaps a bit naive - these companies that start by embracing open standards then pull back from them are just pulling a classic bait-and-switch, with a bit of freeriding off open-source efforts thrown in. They bootstrap their user base and arrive to market quickly by using tools built by others. Then once they grow and gain market and mind share, they can start closing themselves off, walling the garden. And it's ju…
Here's an idea: there should be a maximum number N of employees a company can have. This enforces companies to think about the greater good, because if you're in a company that is split because of size, you might end up in a different company. Also, a maximum on the number of employees stimulates the "modularity" of the market: large conglomerates with internal markets will not be possible anymore.
I'm not sure of all the repercussions, but perhaps we can start with N at a large value, and slowly (over several decades) decrease it, and see what happens.
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#18From the Flipboard page: > You cannot build a 60fps scrolling list view with DOM. I simply do not believe that. I have no problems scrolling around the internet. And the examples they give (flipboard.com/@flipboard) give me no clue about what their problem with the DOM is. I find it really hard to imagine you couldn't do that in the DOM. I wonder what is going on over there.
You cannot build a 60fps scrolling list view with a DOM. Can't complain; their results do look gorgeous.
I would love to see a minimal example of a "dynamic scrolling list view with custom animations" that does not work smoothly on my old Nexus 4.
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the author is trying to say that we should build products on top of established, open standards. Or, where applicable and within reason, we should integrate them into our product. Allows our users to more easily integrate our products into their existing workflows.
AFAIK canvas is an open standard. the OP is like someone criticizing a website that chose to use canvas over svg to display graphs,because canvas isn't accessible. It has nothing to do with using Open standards or not.
It's not about graphs, it's about the entire app. That includes lists and paragraphs of text.
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#20So we should never create anything new, then?
No. You just must build your new things in such ways that your competitors can easily repeat them and your customers can easily migrate to your competitors.
Your competitors are going to "repeat" you and take your Customers anyway. If lock-in is your value proposition then you have no value proposition. Using open protocols allows your Customers to do interesting things with your service that you never envisioned.