Anything you don't know is hard. Four months ago I switched from web development to native iOS work and I couldn't stop complaining how much harder it is - "Who on their right mind thought that creating and managing UI elements in code is a good idea". Fast forward to present day I still find creating UIs in HTML to be faster but the gap is not that big anymore and I really don't care one way or the other.
I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer
21–30 of 89 posts
Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer
#22For me, web development seems like the exact opposite of desktop development. In desktop development, you learn the underlying foundations first (the programming language, files, networking, graphics, GUIs, etc), then weave them together to build your application. It's slow, but worth it -- often the concepts are universal. How many times do you have to re-learn file IO? In web development, it's really easy to build…
Perhaps I'm misreading your post, but RAD environments for desktop applications have been around for over a decade. I wasn't exactly an early adopter and I remember dragging and dropping a button onto a form using Delphi 4 under Windows 98. And then you could drag and drop to resize it and formatting it was so easy a 13-year-old could do it. I didn't have a clue about Win32 API or the graphics drivers or bitmap buffers or memory buses and it totally didn't matter.
Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer
#23Every once in a while, another developer has that revelation: http://berislav.lopac.net/post/4726275775/of-course-web-deve...
Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is using a solid platform not a good plan?
It may be technically solid but still a bad bet. Flex/Air are essentially deadend platforms as Adobe jumps on the HTML5 bandwagon with its toolset. If he puts his effort into developing his Flex/Air skills, he's targeting a shrinking install base and future market for jobs. If he puts it into HTML/JS/CSS instead, he's targeting a large and growing install base, for mobile, browser and Win8 desktop apps.
I think a platform that makes developers struggle with implementation details and browser quirks is a dead end, no matter what Adobe does.
In my experience, there's a low signal to noise ratio when learning HTML/JS/CSS. A lot of it is learning hacks, as opposed to getting a general sense of how computers work. Flash/AIR are very good in this regard. If Flash disappears tomorrow, I don't think his skills would go to waste.
Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer
#25I honestly find it easier to build UI elements from the ground up over using plug-ins, because like with any other code if you are the one who developed it you understand it.
I too have been turned off by lightbox and slider plugins for jQuery, and find it easier to just come up with that kind of thing myself rather than jump into someone else's codebase.
Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer
#26off topic: Which is correct grammar -- "an HTML" or "a HTML" ? This question has always bugged me.
An HTML.
As an aside, what increasingly bugs me is the number of programmers who seem to have bought the urban myth that "An green apple" is grammatically correct, and have proceeded to pepper their project documentation with awkward and incorrect statements.
A comment on the issue[1]: There is a bizarre urban legend of sorts that you're "supposed to" use "an" if the head noun in the noun phrase it determines begins with a vowel sound, rather than the first word in the noun phrase, giving rise to claims that "an green apple" is somehow "technically" correct. Here is a blog post of someone who seems to have gotten this idea. And here is the discussion on Language Log about that blog post.
In any case, the rule is that you use "an" if the next word begins with a vowel sound. Vowel sound is crucial here because many words that begin with vowel letters do not begin with vowel sounds (e.g. user) and vice versa (e.g. hour).
This makes it a kind of sandhi rule for "intrusive N" in English for indefinite articles, avoiding hiatus between the article and the following word.
[1] http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/152/when-should-i...
Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer
#27Actually, this criticism is true when you use HTML for what it was not intended to do : Make pretty renderings. The core functionality of HTML is to provide hyperlinked data. It does that concisely and efficiently. CSS and DIVs are a mere kludge added on top of a language that is supposed to transmit mainly semantical data. I really wish xhtml would have won in place of HTML/CSS. This kind of things would have been f…
Same here. I think the return to "do whatever you want and we try to interpret it correctly" was wrong. Code in XHTML is way more readable, maintainable and easier to learn (IMO). I still write my HTML5 in correct XHTML Syntax.
I freaked out a little when I started seeing do-whatever-you-want creep back in when I first read diveintohtml5.org (mirrored: http://diveintohtml5.info/).
Sure, you save some (or a great deal many) characters, but at the cost of making everything that needs to work with it more complex. (Browsers are a large slice of this pie, but by no means is the only slice.)
I'm going to sit back and wait for the cycle to come back around to XHTML-like correctness again.
Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer
#28Anything you don't know is hard. Four months ago I switched from web development to native iOS work and I couldn't stop complaining how much harder it is - "Who on their right mind thought that creating and managing UI elements in code is a good idea". Fast forward to present day I still find creating UIs in HTML to be faster but the gap is not that big anymore and I really don't care one way or the other.
Are you not using Interface Builder for iOS? You should.
Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer
#29Actually, this criticism is true when you use HTML for what it was not intended to do : Make pretty renderings. The core functionality of HTML is to provide hyperlinked data. It does that concisely and efficiently. CSS and DIVs are a mere kludge added on top of a language that is supposed to transmit mainly semantical data. I really wish xhtml would have won in place of HTML/CSS. This kind of things would have been f…
I argued with one of my friends about exactly this point. He said that web development is great, that the HTML is semantics, CSS is style, javascript is everything active, everything neatly in their own files.
What I said is - look at ANY of top100 Alexa websites and show me ONE where style, semantics and action is not mangled together in one big chaos, where HTML is just semantics and not DIVs put inside each other in a hierarchy that doesn't follow semantic logic, but visual logic (with divs classes "UP", "upper_menu" etc), where javascript sits neatly in its file instead being all over the place.
I don't remember the outcome of the debate, because we then proceeded to talk about TV shows.
Re: I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer
#30I felt too lazy to be a Flex programmer. After years in HTML-land, MXML programming felt like an absolute kludge and Adobe's flex tools were slower than molasses. I was miserable enough doing it that I rejected multiple flex jobs that came my way.
When adobe eventally pause to ponder the Doom hanging over the flash ecosystem, they will realize that it was Flex that killed it.