alert debugging - Latest Comments

Re: The Promise of the Web

Markus — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 08:02:31 -0000

Your article has really struck a chord with me.

Re: The Promise of the Web

mpt — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:00:51 -0000

I never said that I “like things the way they are”. I am not a wild-eyed Web evangelist. I know that the Web being a multi-vendor platform means it will almost always lag behind native platforms. I know that those native platforms will often have unpleasant restrictions, and all of them will eventually be abandoned. I know that it will probably be much harder, in 2100, for your great-grandchildren to run an iPhone application you wrote yesterday than it will be for them to read this Web page.

All of that sucks. But that is the tradeoff. The Web lags behind native platforms, and then outlives them. That is its curse and its promise.

My disagreement with you is very simple. You propose first an organizational solution, and then a technical solution, for the Web to develop just as fast as native platforms without losing what has made it popular. I say simply that neither would work. The organizational solution profoundly misunderstands
how open source works, and suffers from a problem perhaps best summarized as “you and whose army?”. The technical solution is at least more interesting, but despite referring to the problems Flash had in the transition to mobile, you do not
explain how your “hooks for basic technologies” would avoid the same kinds of problems in the next great transition, whatever that turns out to be.

So that I’m not just a nay-sayer, there are both organizational and technical changes that would make the Web develop faster. For example, CSS probably would develop faster if it was developed more like HTML is. JavaScript probably would develop faster if Google wasn’t secretly planning to replace it. HTTP might develop faster if someone tried implementing SPDY in nginx. And so on.

Re: The Promise of the Web

Paul Stamatiou — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 02:39:16 -0000

Well said Francisco. (might want to update your about page)

Re: The Promise of the Web

Maksim Lin — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 23:20:37 -0000

its given your background that makes me all the more surprised at your comments.

I wonder if you thought about why the iphone could ship without Flash support?
I certainly have no idea, but I do know why whoever signed off on the decision did - because they thought they could get away with it. Pretty sure they didn't think they same about <img> elements or JS runtime.

Re-reading your artlcle after your last comment, I'm left wondering what exactly it is you are asking *for*?? Its clear what you're against, but what exactly is it that you want to see and think will make life better for us webdevs? At least Joe Hewitts comes out and says he wants someone (Apple? Google?) to come along force Webkit (along with mobile safari?) down everyones throats, but I'd like to know if thats whet you are arguing for? or if not what is?

Re: The Promise of the Web

Bobby Wilson — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 23:18:35 -0000

I think that webOS could have been much like you describe. In fact, it kind of was, but they couldn't get traction in the mobile world. They had hooks into the native device from javascript, you can style native interfaces with CSS. You write all your application code with JavaScript. HP was the "owner" who was trying to get any developers they could involved to build great stuff and have a rich developer community.

I know that webOS isn't on the desktop, and that we are talking native apps again not the web, but I imagine something like webOS being a great web browser. Being able to make web apps with native style hooks like you mention would be amazing.

I am not some webOS fanboy, I don't even own or have ever owned a device. I just think they had such a great concept of using the technology we know and extending it to work with their devices.

You didn't mention webOS in your article, but as I read it I immediately thought of it and I am curious about your opinion on it.

Re: The Promise of the Web

tolmasky — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:53:49 -0000

I've been in this business a while actually. I was on the original iPhone team and wrote Mobile Safari. So as it turns out, I know how these things work from both sides of the equation.

Secondly, all your examples of "contributing" are trivial. It's like saying "want JavaScript to have a fibonacci function? Just write it! See you really do have a say in things! It's that easy." OK, great.

PhoneGap represents exactly the opposite of what I want from the web. PhoneGap is transforming a web technology and making it into an inferior native technology. PhoneGap only works in the little native wrapper they write, oh and by the way, I have yet to see any impressive PhoneGap apps. Let me know when something that is charting in the app store is written in PhoneGap then *maybe* we can have a discussion. I'm also not aware of very many significant technologies PhoneGap has created and introduced which then made it back into the browser. I'm still waiting on that camera API to finally become available... This of course being a straw man issue altogether because PhoneGap is simply providing features that *already* exist on native (and are oftentimes already proposed in a spec). So yeah, maybe someday they'll make it into the browser, but it won't be because of PhoneGap.

Those public forums for discussion you speak of rarely involve actual web developers because the process is so frustrating. For a little humorous reading, go find the thread where the query selector was denied long before jQuery existed (because why would that be useful?), and just think of all the man months (years?) that resulted in wasted developer time trying to micro-optimize in JavaScript.

Re: The Promise of the Web

Maksim Lin — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:41:12 -0000

Let me try again...

Firstly there is NOTHING stopping you from innovating. How hard or easy it will be depends on what you are trying to achieve.

I you want a nicer syntax for JS, Coffeescript shows you a path that can be taken. Want to have access to a mobiles addressbook or camera, look to something like phoneGap as a first step. No one is saying you need to fork a browser, but I don't see anyone stopping you from submitting a patch into Mozillas Bugzilla or how about contributing to the PUBLIC email thread where devs from Moz and Google were, err *strongly*, discussing implementation of the Web Audio API earlier this year.

Mate, I don't know how long you've been in this business what one thing I can assure is no one will ever ask for your opinion - you need to pitch in without being asked and work/argue for what you want. That's what everyone else is doing.

Re: corporate ownership, what I meant is that there are corporate interests in *everything* on the web, rather than in nothing.

But, and this is the key point, the web exists in its form because thats what everyone agrees on. Everyone writes in HTML/CSS/JS because thats what all the major browser vendors agree on! Thats what I mean about everyones opinion counting. Looks at your examples of innovation: XHR, became widely used because the other browsers implemented after MS. Canvas was the same. VBScript? nope. SVG and Video - maybe yes, now that all the browser vendors are shipping it. BUT what drove MS to implement alot of the new features, were they "forced" by a stds committee or by the other vendors? NO. they did it because they were/are losing huge market share, largely driven by the choices of webdevs! Yes the choices of webdevs, the ones you seem to completely disregard. Its the same choices that stopped ActiveX being widely adopted on the public web, its the same choices now that are making many sites back away from going the apps route, because they can now see what lies at the end of it.

And that in the end is what gets me about your and Hewitts arguement, is that somehow the Apps vendors, lead by Apple are somehow "winning".
Mate, they have lost!
They failed to gain a monopoly position and that was their only chance, because in a world of more than 1 vendor, it does come back to eveyone having to agree on what they will *ALL* support, and I will bet you anything that it won't be Cocoa Apps written Objective-C running iOS.

PS., please, I have never participated in the Rails "community" but your quote "... demonstrate a feature, and force the owners to adopt it" is about the most idiotic thing I have ever heard. I think no one has ever forced them (starting with DHH onwards) to even speak in a civil tone, let alone adopt a feature.

Re: The Promise of the Web

tolmasky — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:19:03 -0000

There is no misunderstanding here, you simply like the way things are (slow, and inevitably always behind competing technologies), and I don't. I'm not trying to have the standards bodies predict features - I agree, they are terrible at writing features. Quite the contrary, I would simply like a way for us the developers to implement those features ourselves instead of having to beg for them only to have them show up in a semi-functional state upwards of a decade after they were needed. Had the iPhone existed back in the day, YouTube may have been a solely native phenomenon (the way check-in based social networks are almost entirely mobile native today).

It's fine, the web can clearly exist the way it is, just don't be surprised if it loses more and more ground to native. 5 years from now people may be self publishing blog apps instead of sending you a URL. Might seem crazy now, but I would have said that nytimes making a native app was crazy 5 years ago too. If you are OK with that, then by all means continue to support the current process and infrastructure.

Re: The Promise of the Web

tolmasky — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:05:27 -0000

There is absolutely something stopping me and you from innovating and having that widely adopted as a standard.

For starters, how exactly do you propose we innovate? We create our own mini browser for every little feature and try to get enough adoption? This is impractical - there is no way to do this. At BEST you can try to get your feature implementation accepted as a patch to one of the existing open source browsers - but here there is still a gate keeper. Notice that no new feature has ever been developed in the way you describe -- as something individual developers have independently created, tested, and then had move in to mainline. It has always been introduced by one of the big major players (such as Apple with canvas or Microsoft with XMLHttpRequest).

Also, your statement about no corporate ownership is laughable. There is a ton of corporate ownership. Right now web standards are much more influenced by corporate interests than anything else, or have you already forgotten the *endless* fights about which video codec we should use for HTML5, which ultimately resulted in a completely fragmented implementation. Did you have a big say in that? Of course not, it was all political infighting. Right now, if Apple or Microsoft were to decide that feature X was counter to their business' interests, they could effectively kill it and there's nothing we can do about that.

I don't understand where you're coming from regarding everybody's opinion counting and all of us agreeing, and none of these technologies being imposed on us. I don't recall being asked my opinion on any of this. I don't recall to agreeing to any of this, and I certainly would call the current state of affairs as these technologies being imposed on us by a very small minority (which happen to control the browsers of course). Compare this to Rails, where anyone can fork, actually demonstrate a feature, and force the owners to adopt it. Plugins used to be an outlet for us to do this (this is basically what Adobe did with video on Flash). No longer.

I think an interesting exercise for you would be to try to submit an idea to the W3C. After successfully doing that, come back and tell me about what a great democracy web standards are.

Re: The Promise of the Web

mpt — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 21:57:57 -0000

I contributed for several years (though in a tiny way) to the HTML standard. I contribute daily to open source projects. And I am at a loss to understand why you and Joe are arguing strenuously for the former to work like the latter, while fundamentally misunderstanding both.

Hardly any open-source projects are “truly democratic”. Effective open-source projects are benevolent dictatorships and meritocracies — exactly as HTML is. If browser vendors thought Ian Hickson was doing a bad job reconciling their various ideas for the HTML specification, they’d find someone else to do it. (That’s basically how the WhatWG began in the first place.) And if he refused to step down, they’d fork it. Just like the contributors to any open source project.

And as you point out, yes, the ideas are from browser vendors. An individual vendor implements something like Canvas or XHR, to see if it’s viable. Then they propose it (or, not wanting to be left behind, one of their competitors proposes it) as a standard. Anyone can suggest technical improvements, point out pitfalls, and so on, and the editor can take these into account, but the browser vendors collectively have the final say.

That is, at its best, how the Web standards process has worked ever since Mosaic developers proposed the IMG element in 1993. It is not the job of standards bodies to “predict” features, and at they have been at their worst (HTML3, XHTML2, early Semantic Web) when they have tried, so it’s funny for you to imply that they should.

The Web standards process today works more like a distributed open-source project than it ever has. While far from perfect, it is more efficient than it ever was. And just like a typical open-source project, it now finds itself with users complaining that they don’t have more say, and asking for the code to be infinitely configurable. Even the answer is the same — the code is available, go do it yourself. But you wouldn’t even need to go that far: you could implement your francisco-layout purely in Canvas and JavaScript, CSS parsing and all.

Re: The Promise of the Web

Maksim Lin — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 21:56:30 -0000

Nice article, but I think you miss the very same point that Joe Hewitt does, along with the guys at Google working on Dart - the web might be orthogonal to the implementation technologies (html/css/js) but it is completely dependant on everyones agreement on *them* being used!

I think a much better anology for your argument is saying that we shouldn't let the IETF control which protocols everyone uses. Heck, lets not all be stuck with old TCP/IP and creaky old HTTP! Lets just go and make up our own better protocols and use them! Ours will be much better, so of course we'll be able to make everyone else use them too...

You already point this out in your reference to iTunes - just using web tech doesn't make iTunes part of the net, but in exactly the same way, just by being included in a browser does NOT make Flash (or any other plugin) part of the web either!

The whole point about the web is that its what *everyone* agrees around. Its not the best technology, its not everyones first preference, it what everyone agrees on!
All the standards committees mostly (not completely) do is rubber stamp *some* of those mutual agreements when they *already* exist.

That's the key point that both you and Hewitt are missing, what Apple and every other corporate is doing is out there pushing their own agendas and trying to get enough buy-in for those to become widely enough accepted to be "standards" but they have no way of *imposing* that on us (the web dev community) as long as there are no monopolies.

There is NOTHING stopping you, me or any other webdev from innovating and then having that become widely adopted enough to be brought into a standard.

But all this requires no "ownership' and no corporate overloads, be they preachers of 'no evil' or cynical salesman selling gaudy trinkets. What this requires is a bit of mutual respect and an understanding that an open web (open anything actually) means that *everybodys* opinions count, whether they are doing their best to come up with the next big thing or break & replace the entire system, because I tell you what, the past is littered with dead and failed technologies pushed by people with the best intentions that thought that they could win against the web.

To paraphrase what Bredan Eich said recently - Always bet on web!

Re: The Promise of the Web

Karl Klept — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 21:02:18 -0000

I'm typing this on an Apple product and I agree that companies inevitably come and go. In fact, I think without Jobs (sadly), Apple will go sooner rather than later.

Re: The Promise of the Web

tolmasky — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:35:40 -0000

Again, my main point is not to destroy HTML, and I don't think that's what would happen. Day 1 of this new technology would not be everyone scrambling to write new alternatives to HTML, that would be SEO suicide. My main goal is to make the development of HTML truly democratic the way most open source projects are.

If you look at the revolutionary changes in the web, they all happened this way. Canvas came about because Apple decided to add it as a completely proprietary extension to Dashboard. Microsoft (!) added XMLHTTPRequest. All of these were ground breaking on the web, and completely unpredicted by standards bodies. Would you like me to link you to the famous discussion thread where built in query selectors were denied long before jquery existed?

Now, imagine if all of us had the ability that only a few browsers have now - to add features we thought were important without asking permission. Imagine if tomorrow I could start implementing Cocoa's new automatic layout in HTML, perhaps by adding francisco-layout: to CSS. This would change HTML and CSS very little, and be mostly a *renderer* change. Instead, today I have to be content with whatever the browser vendors deem worthy as a proper CSS addition.

Re: The Promise of the Web

tolmasky — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:30:04 -0000

There are competitors, lots of them. They're called native, and from where I'm sitting, they're winning.

Re: The Promise of the Web

justinvoss — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:28:43 -0000

I'd love to hear you elaborate on your ideas in the last paragraph: what would such a system look like, in detail? Does the browser become a kind of VM that only runs bytecode and sandboxes apps? Would some kind of standards body have to continuously invent new bytecode instructions for using the camera, geolocation, sound, etc?

I haven't had time to let the idea settle and take form, but here's my thought for avoiding a tangle of bytecode instructions: what if every feature outside of basic computations were implemented over some kind of socket-like concept? Opening a connection to one socket allows your app to draw to the screen, a different socket allows the app to access the camera, etc. Each one would obviously have it's own wire protocol. A low-level stream of bytes is easy enough to build abstractions on - that's how the web works now.

Re: The Promise of the Web

tolmasky — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:28:41 -0000

As I said in the article, I have spoken to Joe a number of times about this, and I even had him read this beforehand to make sure I wasn't putting words in his mouth. All that to say, I really think he and I are in agreement about this stuff.

The point about Apple providing compilers is an improper analogy. The correct point is should Intel be designing high level API's? Of course not, Intel precisely only provides an instruction set and a compiler and allows everyone else to write the abstractions they see fit.

Re: The Promise of the Web

elgoogreverse — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:24:15 -0000

That's the point!

Re: The Promise of the Web

mpt — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:23:11 -0000

Plain text transmission is not nearly enough. First, that would leave us with search engines little better than AltaVista and HotBot were. It is HTML’s A element, more than anything else, that tells Google which pages are most relevant. It is HTML’s IMG element that allows image search. It is HTML’s DT, DD, TR, and other elements that help search engines provide definitions and instant answers, and so on. Searchability would be a massive chicken-and-egg problem if HTML had not been, or does not remain, standardized.

Second, if HTML was not the overwhelming Web language, the mobile Web would now be deeply unpleasant — if it even existed at all. It is HTML’s separation of structure and presentation that allows reflow of zoomed-in text. It is HTML’s (mostly) presentation-agnostic form controls that allows finger-friendly presentations on phones and tablets. And (though perhaps least importantly, in the long run) it is the ability to present most of the Web without plug-ins that lets devices last as long as they do without recharging.

In short, if HTML was not the overwhelming Web language, I would not easily be able to search for and play Jacob Seidelin’s version of Mario Brothers on the Web — because it is hosted on an HTML page and implemented using HTML’s canvas element.

Re: The Promise of the Web

Rhodri Karim — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:22:54 -0000

Your ideal browser sounds an awful lot like the JVM...

Re: The Promise of the Web

elgoogreverse — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:22:51 -0000

While I like Apple products: Don't forget, that very few big IT companies lasted forever or even long. Think of DEC...

Re: The Promise of the Web

elgoogreverse — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:20:41 -0000

But if we believe in markets - which we may not these days.. - why didn't appear a new competitor with a real innovation to bring things to the next level?

In other words: While we probably don't like M$, are others probably not innovative enough?

To fight against a stronger enemy, think and probably act as your enemy.

Re: The Promise of the Web

elgoogreverse — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:16:14 -0000

Kill all plugins and make a new super plugin ;-) NaCl reminds me to ActiveX - hopefully less harmful.

Re: The Promise of the Web

elgoogreverse — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:10:43 -0000

Thank you for a very interesting article! Some thoughts:

As a developer stated some weeks ago: 'JavaScript is the assembler of the web-age.' I really wonder, how many developers over and over - for a decade or so - try to make the browser as feature rich or complete as an operating system.

Why did the web didn't come along faster? Because it has a very low level technical base, technology provided by different browsers on different machines is different. It's hard to rely on something.

Furthermore, as always in IT, each few years a new paradigm gets proposed. Complex homogenous system? Just use SOAP! Hm, yeah, it's not that easy to cut complex systems into separate parts. Need to add some 'knowledge' to your apps? No problem, use the semantic web. Hm, sorry, in fact we still don't know what to do and how. Many site and services? Just mash it up! Any don't forget to write data converts first - which may take longer than the mashup itself. But, no problem, just be RESTful...

Since the internet hype around the year 2000 I haven't seen much innovation. Most notably, AJAX. How funny, that this technology came from Microsoft...

I really like technology and innovation.

But what do we gain by an enormous amount of languages and an enormous amount of add-on frameworks? Yes, choice. But I wonder if it's much more. Moreover, the question 'Have I chosen the right technology for the next 10 years?' comes along...

In the 80th, we had the big software crisis. Different operating-system, different DBMS, different languages and even different encodings (still know EBCDIC?).

Reminds me to the web-technology landscape these days.

Finally, I wonder, why no one ever tried to use the existing plugin interfaces of various browsers to implement a richer basis? Isn't the technology for community involvement available for more than a decade?

Re: The Promise of the Web

elgoogreverse — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:38:58 -0000

Some examples of rich feature plugins: Mathematica or LiveMath.

Re: The Promise of the Web

ken — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:23:17 -0000

While what you're arguing is reasonable, you're stretching when you say 'I think what Joe meant is that HTML, JavaScript, and CSS need to be “demoted”, both in a technological and philosophical sense'

I don't think that's what he meant at all. Joe is railing against stagnation by committee. He is explicitly saying that a single-owner getting complacent and letting things stagnate is something he fears less than stagnation via design by committee and the pain of having to move along multiple implementations to get anything new done and usable.

While I'm sure sometimes great things are driven by competition, I think they're more often driven by people who intrinsically value making great things. The committee aspect of the web is tougher on such folk than the benevolent dictator model. Fewer people to convince in the latter model.

What you're asking for, for the browsers to supply something more stable, well defined, and low level, while relying on people above the browser to innovate is a potential way out… but that has some pretty serious problems too. Do you think the iPhone would be better if Apple just provided compilers, and not Cocoa? It asks the developers to be far more sophisticated than they are today, to pick a stack before getting going at all. And it punts on the responsibility for actually making the web _good_. That's almost exactly opposite of what Joe is saying. He's saying, the wisdom of the crowds does not guarantee greatness, the best way to make something great is to step up and do it, fully, coherently and completely.