Found this article on Curl linked off TR. Curl is a client-side web scripting language that’s supposed to replace HTML, JavaScript, and Flash all at once. I remember when Curl was discussed on Slashdot a few months ago; the general consensus was that it had star power (Tim Berners-Lee) but not much else.
This latest article seems to acknowledge all the hard problems of creating a new language, not the least of which is the chicken and egg problem of getting users (they’re targeting intranet applications first). But it doesn’t address the real problem: who’s going to program it? Everybody knows HTML. Lots of people know JavaScript. Some people are really good at Flash. Nobody knows Curl. So they’re going to have to learn it. Well, Curl.com would be happy to sell you some developer training… at $1,500/person. Gee, thanks.
There are other problems with Curl. Curl allegedly “shifts the computing burden away from the site’s servers onto the visitor’s PC, saving network bandwidth and costs.” But for intranet applications, your company owns both the servers and the “visitor’s” PC, so that’s a false economy. You might save a few pennies in network bandwidth (assuming you’re paying for network bandwidth; if your company is all in one building, you probably just have a few miles of Ethernet cable and plenty of bandwidth just sitting there), but you’ll lose it all back in developer training costs, user support costs (”I installed Curl and my computer crashed” — what, you thought version 1.0 would work flawlessly?), and so forth.
Finally, I’m not convinced that “Curl addresses a core problem of the Net: It’s a programming muddle” when creating “rich content, such as animation.” Here’s a clue: users don’t care about rich content, they care about getting work done. The core problem of the Net is not the lack of rich content, it’s the fact that the content we have already sucks, and the applications we have to access that content are hard to use in ways that have nothing to do with the underlying technology and everything to do with the people implementing that technology. You want to save some money? Invest in some usability reviews.
Look for Curl.com on fuckedcompany.com by the end of the year.
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