You're probably not a web developer so you may not fully understand my rage regarding this issue. When I say "open" I mean open source with open processes for developing technologies. To heck with that! It may sound good to most but I promise you its holding us back! The internet is great and I personally love to make great things on it. But because its so great and everyone uses it we can sometimes get stuck using old stuff that doesn't really work as good as the new stuff.
For instance the programming language that makes practically anything useful you do on the internet actually work is JavaScript. Its okay but honestly there are way better tools for building great things out there. Yet we're stuck with it. Why? Because it just happened to be first. JavaScript was put together by one guy in two weeks because he had to get something out there. The only reason its called JavaScript is because Java (another programming language) was popular at the time and so marketing dictated the name. (The two languages are nothing alike). Yet the haphazardly put together languages runs nearly everything you do interactive on the web. But on your desktop a huge variety of languages run your applications and those are generally better because they were made with better stuff.
The web is too afraid of implementing better tools because in order to do so they would have to come to an agreement on an entirely new language and implement it world-wide. My view is that this view is based on a false premise - that everyone needs to do the same thing. Lets get some variety and competition into the world of the web. Its time we use something besides antiquated 90s technology. Web developer's like me would love this and you would too. You'd get better applications in your browser and the world would generally be a better place. Doesn't that sound nice? I call upon a brave company to run forward without everybody else and start making better tools for the web from the ground up. Stop worrying about supporting every internet user known to man! Move forward! Let them catch up! The world will be better for it.
Then how do you attribute the new tools that are emerging like NodeJS, Angular - even HTML 5? These are all new technologies of which we've all only tapped the beginning of their potential.
ReplyDeleteOpen standards mean that we can have a continuos experience anywhere on the web and we're not stuck having to use old browsers to view old versions of software *Cough*IE6*Cough* - In my mind it's not the open standards culture that is slow to move on, but individual corporate cultures.
Erm... NodeJS isn't really a new technology. Its actually a manifestation of the problem I highlighted: Everybody knows javascript so lets just keep programming in javascript. Angular is just a framework to patch the deficiencies of the web as we know it. It doesn't attack the root problem. The set of HTML5 technologies we see today are the same thing: patches for a slow moving system. We need to start a new. We need to build something that's ready for the future.
DeleteI agree that corporate cultures are slow to move on. I think we can see that throughout the history of our country. However, sometimes resisting change can help us to only change in ways that are good or better, rather than just accepting all change, no matter how bad it may be.
ReplyDelete