Web Apps: the Future of the Internet, Or Forever a Second-Class Citizen? 205
An anonymous reader writes "This article takes a look at whether web apps will ever match desktop and mobile apps in terms of performance and usability. Jo Rabin, who's leading the push by web standards body W3C to get web app performance up to scratch, is optimistic web apps will eventually be the default choice for building the majority of commercial and business apps, while the article weighs up just how much web technologies need to be improved before this could happen. Quoting: 'Native apps are generally first to gain access to new platform-specific hardware features — be it navigating using a phone's GPS and accelerometer or taking pictures with a phone's camera. But if a particular hardware feature becomes popular, standards to implement that feature in the browser will always follow, Rabin said. Work is taking place within W3C to standardise APIs for web technologies to access many of the features found on modern smartphones. Ongoing work this year includes setting out a system-level API to allow a web app to manage a device's contacts book, a messaging API for sending and receiving SMS and MMS, new mechanisms for capturing photos and recordings, new event triggers that could handle mouse, pen and touch inputs, a new push API to allow web apps to receive messages in the background, new media queries for responsive web design, an API for exchanging information using NFC and precise control over resource loading times in a web document.'"
GRRRR (Score:2, Interesting)
GRRR, this is STUPID!
This drives me mad. Webapps have pushed usability a good 20 years back.
Look at all the pb in desktop apps: we still don't have it "right", and now, there is an increasing tendency towards webapps that have even worse choice of widgets, and don't respect many usability issues that desktop had barely started solving... And don't get me started on the browsers compatibility issues!
This is CRAZY! People are building GUI inside a medium that has never been designed for that, using always more complex layers for a worse user experience (and don't get me started about the performances loss).
Re:Could Browsers Settled on an Alternate Language (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like some of the problem here is that Javascript is the Lingua Franca, and also that it has to use the web pages DOM. If the system were being designed from scratch, it seems unlikely this would be the choice.
I think there is a Peter Principle for technology: Every good, proven technology gets extended, extended, and extended until it breaks. Back in the day, the web was a fast, simple, stateless request/response document retrieval system. Then some markup was added to make the documents look pretty. Then CGI and server-side processing were added to make the content more dynamic. Then tricks were applied (eg- cookies) to break the statelessness, albeit in a limited way. Then the prettiness of documents were improved with CSS and liquid design. Things got slow. Then the scalability of the server side was improved with various frameworks like JSP, Struts, Rails, etc. Applets had been tried, but they didn't take off because security and version control turned out to be much bigger problems than anyone realized at the time. Then JavaScript was extended and made to do all sorts of unsecure things. AJAX came along and broke the request/response document retrieval model for good. Things got slow again, especially on newer mobile platforms. Now the w3c wants to figure out how to run fat applications on this platform, ostensibly because it's shared in common across OSes.
Rinse, Repeat. Everything old is new again.