141–150 of 218 posts
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Noticed Paul Irish is no longer active on H5BP, is he now on team Web Starter Kit or working on the broader Web Fundamentals?
Paul Irish has given us guidance, input and feedback and is on the same team as me, but Addy Osmani is the main driver of starter kit, with me leading Web Fundamentals.
The web is now hamstrung by the HTML/CSS layout model more than anything else. The hackery required to attempt to imitate native mobile apps is horrific. Google would be better off throwing efforts into a new layout engine leveraging raw JS and WebGL, but with a sane API, than these continuous attempts to push HTML into places where it doesn't work. If they don't lead it I can see someone else doing it in such a way…
WebGL is great when what you're trying to do simply can't be done in a high-performance manner using standardized markup.
However, a generalist WebGL-powered UI framework would suffer the same drawbacks that Flash/Flex/Silverlight did: your content ceases being semantic. Of course, some sort of convoluted metadata system to preserve this could be devised, or simply run parallel to real markup that's not rendered, but those types of solutions are ugly at best.
In my opinion, if you're going so far as WebGL to achieve UI performance in a mobile context, you should probably just make a native mobile app instead. At the moment, WebGL support on mobile tends to be incomplete and suffers from poor performance on most devices anyways.
Mobile will always lag behind desktop in terms of browser performance and features, but browser optimization and mobile hardware is improving every day. Keep in mind that both desktop and mobile browsers already utilize GPU acceleration in some aspects of rendering normal content.
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The shocking, unprecedented, world-changing difference that the web brings is that on the web all you have to do is click a link and your computer downloads, "installs", and runs a program. No manual installation necessary, no upgrades, no installers or wizards. No delay. This process is safe -- the page is sandboxed and can't interfere with the rest of your machine. And these things can be instantly shared! All I ha…
That's the theory. The practice is that - you give your precious data to third parties - that the safety problem now shifts from keeping your computer safe to keeping data in the hands of third parties safe (and this does not always play out in the way we would like, see codespaces for a recent example) - that even the client side safety is a problem, the 'distribution advantages' have also been recognized widely by…
Ok... What is more fantastic for:
- large audiences?
- users who can't install/update software?
- " " can't/don't back up data?
- developers who don't have the resources to target multiple devices/platforms?
- integrations with other applications?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The shocking, unprecedented, world-changing difference that the web brings is that on the web all you have to do is click a link and your computer downloads, "installs", and runs a program. No manual installation necessary, no upgrades, no installers or wizards. No delay. This process is safe -- the page is sandboxed and can't interfere with the rest of your machine. And these things can be instantly shared! All I ha…
That's the theory. The practice is that - you give your precious data to third parties - that the safety problem now shifts from keeping your computer safe to keeping data in the hands of third parties safe (and this does not always play out in the way we would like, see codespaces for a recent example) - that even the client side safety is a problem, the 'distribution advantages' have also been recognized widely by…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the theory. The practice is that - you give your precious data to third parties - that the safety problem now shifts from keeping your computer safe to keeping data in the hands of third parties safe (and this does not always play out in the way we would like, see codespaces for a recent example) - that even the client side safety is a problem, the 'distribution advantages' have also been recognized widely by…
But in practice it is much better than any alternative multi-platform instant software installation ecosystem. And in practice, it has led to a thriving ecosystem of applications, most of which can link to each other and will work on a large portion of users' devices.
We're clearly in 'we should be amazed the pig dances at all' territory rather than in 'look how good the pig can dance'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the theory. The practice is that - you give your precious data to third parties - that the safety problem now shifts from keeping your computer safe to keeping data in the hands of third parties safe (and this does not always play out in the way we would like, see codespaces for a recent example) - that even the client side safety is a problem, the 'distribution advantages' have also been recognized widely by…
I think it's both good and bad in theory and both good and bad in practice. Certainly most of the things you list are major downsides, but none of them keep the upside from being (IMO more) major. I'm you're right that the experience is "almost always" sub-par. I would say "often", but not even "usually". I guess YMMV.
There aren't actually many fair/accurate comparisons around since most companies have either a shrink-wrapped product or a webapp. Rarely do you see both, and when there are I agree with jacquesm that the experience is almost always sub-par on the webapp [in comparison to the desktop app].
You can't really compare one company's webapp to another's non-webapp. i.e. you may feel GMail is better than Outlook, but since Google doesn't make a non-webapp version of GMail we don't know if that would be better than both Outlook and gmail.com. Microsoft does make a webapp version of Outlook, but I don't think many people find that better than "real" Outlook.
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You trade browser lock-in for OS lock-in. The original Internet Explorer strategy. Fundamentally it is a rent seeking strategy. When I noticed that Google was up to paying a billion dollars a quarter for traffic I realized that in some ways the gold leaf was falling off the piazza and revealing the the ugly plaster behind it. My guess is that the rent seeking here is in the form of directing search traffic in some wa…
Browser lock-in? What makes you think web applications made with this kit work only in Chrome?
Correct me if I'm wrong :)
How does this compare to Yeoman, and is it meant to be a replacement? I thought Yeoman was made by some Google folks.
"Web Starter Kit is inspired by Mobile HTML5 Boilerplate and Yeoman's generator-gulp-webapp, having taken input from contributors to both projects during development."