you may not…work around any technical limitations in the software
Who are they kidding? Thousands of people have made fine careers out of working around technical limitations in Microsoft software. The ones who are really good at it are known as MVPs.
Preach it.
The pain associated with choosing a proprietary, vendor-controlled platform is close to my heart. Though, I’d be far more likely to compare it to dealing with a sexually transmitted disease than a “pink line in the round window”.
I hereby dub thee “McGrumpy” in honor of that awful show (which my girlfriend makes me watch).
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thanks for another awesome post.
The more things change…
The Flash Era of the web taught, at least, these lessons:
1) Users prefer a lightweight user interface that is clean and simple.
2) Developers prefer open, free, standards-compliant development.
None of these products (except the “new AJAX” vaporware) are either of those things. They are another lame attempt to bolt the desktop UI model onto the Web, and they will fail just as surely.
(snort) Nice rant, McGrumpy. Though I’m doing my best to learn as little about these toys as possible (so I don’t have to unlearn them later), it does look like that they (Flex at least) can provide what people want. In a constrained environment, i.e., inside the firewall, I can see this having a place because one can in theory control all the endpoints. If you can’t, though, stay away.
What to do when we are at the mercy of the ignorant, the misologists? What hope is there when the masses shape the Internet?
— NoHope 
While I agree wholeheartedly with the premise of this (very amusing rant), I have to butt in and say that the demos I’ve seen of Apollo (which were done by Adobe, so clearly there’s an agenda there) definitely suggest you can create Apollo apps with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Is this a bunch of snake oil?
Ah hah … now, finally, we know the answer to the question – Who is John Galt?
It’s a relief to see blowback against the hype. How is it that grown technologists don’t understand whythe openness of ajax is a basic part of the value? How do you get your pundit card without understanding freedom 0?
On the other hand, Flash is not losing market share these days, far from it.
To some extent it’s a cultural thing. For some people paternalism makes their skin crawl. For others it’s a welcome respite from having to own their own lives.
I’m hardly what you’d call a virgin.
But my (metaphorical) vagina and anus aren’t really all that sore yet, so of course these developments are very interesting to me. Do you think either Silverlight or Apollo will come with lube? I hate it when there’s tearing.
— marcos
Your article about licensing of Movable Type seems to contain a misaprehension about licensing.
The *author* of GPL software is perfectly free to make the next version of their software commercial if they want – they are the owner of the copyright and can issue it under whatever license they choose.
Mere license alone is no guarantee.
.NET seems to have been around for a while, and moderately successful in its way. Do you think it will be more shortlived than Open Source technologies?
— Fuzzyman
@Fuzzyman: Read to the end, I touched on that. “In the extremely unlikely event that every single contributor (including every contributor to the original b2) agrees to relicense the code under a more restrictive license, I can still fork the current GPL-licensed code and start a new community around it.”
— Mark
“. Adobe introduced Apollo, their latest attempt to recreate the web in their own image. Apollo is based on Adobe’s own markup language, Adobe’s own runtime, Adobe’s own graphics and animation framework, Adobe’s own video and audio codecs, and Adobe’s own developer tools.”
Hi Mark, I need to check… do you understand Adobe’s Apollo project as a way to bring existing webapps to Mac, Win, and eventually Linux versions?
From what I see, there’s no “recreate”, no markup other than HTML (maybe you’re thinking of Flex & MXML?), the rendering runtimes are Adobe Flash Player and WebKit, I haven’t seen problems with using popular JavaScript frameworks, Player assures the predictable presence of two video codecs, and you can use any SWF-producing tool as well as any HTML/JS/CSS methods you prefer.
Are we talking about the same things here…?
tx, jd/adobe
What do you think of OpenLaszlo? Seems like an interesting response to the proliferation of “rich web” runtimes.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Apollo is based on Webkit/Safari. That is, it’s a web browser that can only view it’s built-in files. It won’t and can’t replace standards, it uses web standards for programming. You can use Flash, which is propriety Adobe tech, but there’s nothing keeping people from using it now for web applications.
http://casario.blogs.com/mmworld/2006/10/apollo_will_use.html
— Peter of the Norse
Runtime? I don’t want no stinkin’ (insert vendor’s proprietary closed-source brand, vapour-ware or product here) runtime.
Adobe and Microsoft can’t / don’t want to even make their media formats available on all platforms (just try to get a native Flash or Acrobat Reader or Media Player and codecs for FreeBSD or Plan 9); why should I believe they actually care about ubiquitous availability of development tools? They don’t. MSFT has always tried to co-opt the development platform to control the deployment market, and if it weren’t for the pesky Mac (which I also loathe but in a somewhat different way) they would have done it.
But then some largely text based protocols and simplicity itself has threatened for some time now to overturn the OS and tool hegemony Microsoft, and some new aspirants, would like to see continue or develop.
Looked at from a different light, would we have anything resembling a web standards movement if Flash and Silverlight were “web” platforms years ago? No, we’d have either/or movements, driven by vendors. I don’t get how yet-another-proprietary platform from any vendor, but in particular from Microsoft, is a good thing for computing and application development.
I’m a bit surprised that some of the community is so keen on the latest marketing coming out of Adobe and Microsoft. Perhaps they confuse support for Windows and Mac (maybe) as being “cross platform”.
A tool (and many higher level web and GUI tools built with it) like Python *is* cross platform — it’ll run on everything from mainframes to cell phones — Silverlight (insert vendor’s proprietary closed-source brand, vapour-ware or product here) and other such platforms are not.
@jd: Are you telling me that Adobe is going to contribute code back upstream to WebKit so they can natively implement window.runtime and all its associated APIs that you invented? You’re embracing and extending the web; don’t try to score points by focusing on the part you’re embracing.
— Mark
John Dowdell: “… eventually Linux”
Eventually Linux! Woo hoo! Praise Adobe!
I’ll assume that’s x86 only (and maybe, possibly x64). That leaves every single other architecture (including almost every mobile device and most ‘embedded’/appliance devices). That still leaves everyother OS (Including mobile OSes that ‘regular’ folk use). That still leaves the myriad of functional problems of Silverlight/Apollo.
Do you understand open standards? Interoperability? Do you understand freedom?
— jkl
Wow… talk about establishing zero credibility from line one. Next time, maybe you should read the FAQs you link before making your sensationalist little arguments about them, eh?
Apollo just another platform for deploying desktop applications.
To invoke the obligatory highschool level explanation: Flash is to Java Applets as Apollo is to Java Applications.
What, pray tell, does a another framework for writing stuff like jEdit and Azureus have to do with Silverlight?
If I need to run a Java application, I make sure I have the JRE installed. If I need to run a Python application, I make sure I have the Python interpreter installed. If I need to run an Apollo application…
— Ammon
If I need to run a Python application on a platform – any platform – there is probably a Python “runtime” already compiled or available — *freely available** — as a port for my platform(s) of choice. If there isn’t, the full source code is available to me to make it so.
This is most certainly not true of Apollo or Silverlight, or even Java at this point.
@jkl: Wow, I totally missed the “eventually Linux” line from JD’s comment. Eventually Linux. That’s priceless. As an AMD64 Linux user, let me be the first (well, I guess the second) to spit a big fat raspberry towards Adobe’s idea of “eventually Linux.”
— Mark
There no such thing as “Adobe’s own markup language” that is required to build Apollo apps. Apollo apps can be (and have been) built using just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I do agree with the anti-propriatary/pro-openness sentiment of this post, but that one line about “Apollo is based on Adobe’s own markup language” is simply false.
Mark, I’m afraid people (like JD, for example) are going to get hung up on that one piece of what seems like FUD and miss your bigger, and much more interesting, point.
C’mon, you should at least be excited about Silverlight’s DLR. Client-side IronPython on the web making native calls to ActiveRecord and script.aculo.us! How awesome is that??
— Carlo
@Jeff: you can get hung up on whatever you like, but the fact of the matter is that you can build Apollo apps with “Adobe’s own markup language” (Flash + Flex). Yes, you can also build them with “just” HTML + JavaScript, but even that environment has been “enhanced” with the window.runtime object. Just like with Microsoft’s “enhanced” JVM (remember that?), the minute you use window.runtime, you’re locked into Adobe’s platform for life.
— Mark
Fair enough, I guess.
heh, you guys are killin’ me, it’s nice to know you care…. ;-)
Yes, to “upstream webkit”:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:developerfaq#Does_Adobe_plan_to_submit_changes_back_to_the_WebKit_project.3F
For “eventually linux”:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:developerfaq#Does_Apollo_support_Linux
I’m guessing the answer to my original question is “no”, then. If you want to deliver your work only through the browser, then I don’t think Apollo will be of much interest. But if you’ve ever wanted to take your HTML skills outside of the browser, and create your own desktop applications, then Apollo may be of very great interest. Your call.
jd/adobe
Your writing is acrid. Perhaps you have childhood issues that need resolving?
— Sina
You must be new here.
— Mark
@Sina Bitter is a taste only a muature palette can appreciate.
s/muature/mature/
s/palette/palate/
(I hate the Mac keyboard)
It’s as they old saying goes Phil, “The leaping frog takes no prisoners.” Clearly you are a frog.
— Sina
Judging by the direction the comments seem to be heading on this one, it’s almost as though – with his title alone – he has proclaimed and then initiated “Silly Season” in this post.
Did you ever see that horrible movie where Sean Connery creates a machine that controls the weather? He can make it rain over a phonebooth and stuff like that. I think Uma Thurman is in it, too.
That’s what this is like – it’s Silly Season from the blue gradient to the copyright – and it came out of nowhere.
How does he do that?
— Ryan
At least we’re seeing some innovation. I remember a suggestion of Python for Firefox that never came through, but Microsoft just delivered it with Silverlight. If nothing else, I hold out hope that this will encourage FOSS competition.
— Norman Gerre
Em, but doesn’t Google use Flash a fair amount on Google Finance and YouTube? I thought if Google did something it was ok for we technological virgins?
The argument that ‘Apollo is for desktop applications’ is disingenous.
Apollo is targeted at web application developers, hoping that they’ll use the extended, proprietary capabilities of the environment to make software that competes in the web application domain. In fact, the primary method of market infiltration for Adobe appears to be getting the big web app companies (eg, eBay) to develop Apollo-only additions to their software, then drive their customers towards it.
Is this a problem in itself? Hell if I know. But it certainly makes the “Apollo is just desktop applications/analogous to Java applications” line deceptive.
— Joseph
The Python glue works with Firefox on the trunk, and has for quite some time. You need to provide a Python runtime for it (in no small part because of the inter-version fragility of C-Python runtime APIs) but then you can write your extensions and apps with Python. The ActiveState guys have been doing it with Komodo for years, as it happens, though without the tight DOM integration that’s now on the trunk.
I’m not sure if IronPython participates in the new Silverlight security model, but I doubt that you’d have a good experience with C-Python exposed to the web. That’s another story for another day, though…
Mike
jd@37: the key part you glossed over was “…so they can natively implement window.runtime and all its associated APIs that you invented?”. Stress on the word ‘all’.
In other words, are you going to ‘upstream’ your otherwise proprietary features and enhancements, or just the things that you think of as ‘improvements to WebKit’.
So far, I read nothing here about your new APIs for window.runtime:
http://opensource.adobe.com/adobe_apollo.html
If, as you suggest, I “take my HTML skills outside of the browser, and create my own desktop applications”, can they then run in an open-source WebKit window, or only in Apollo?
— Anonymous
So where is the Free/Open flavor of this stuff? Are we looking at XULRunner type stuff? I find it hard to believe that Adobe & MS announce these things so close to each other & there is no “response” or “flavor” from the OSS community.
— lukin
@lukin – arguably it’s OpenLaszlo, but personally I still need to be convinced. In fact, I still need to be convinced of the virtues of ‘rich’.
— Joseph
From http://www.openlaszlo.org:
OpenLaszlo is “write once, run everywhere.” An OpenLaszlo application developed on one machine will run on all leading Web browsers on all leading desktop operating systems.
Why does this statement make me twinge…
— Ryan
@Mike: IronPython definitely participates in the Silverlight security model. It and the DLR are both security transparent, which means that it is as secure as the underlying web browser that executes the plug-in. In other words, you cannot call any security critical APIs. If security transparent code attempts to call security critical APIs, the CLR will throw.
And your comment is absolutely spot-in with regards to CPython and why you don’t want it exposed to the web – a flaw in CPython exposes your browser process to external exploits. A flaw in IronPython (and the DLR) does not.
— John Lam
@lukin: Let me tell you how this conversation will end. You implicitly assume that these platforms are a good idea, even aside from the obvious lock-in issues. That is, your question assumes that Microsoft’s vision (embodied in Silverlight) is How The World Should Work. Several people (not realizing this implicit assumption) will throw out some ideas — OpenLazso, wxWidgets, Qt4 — and then several other people will spend enormous amounts of virtual ink debating the strengths and weaknesses of those ideas as they compare to Microsoft’s vision (embodied in Silverlight). You will then conclude that the Free Software community is hopelessly behind and has nothing to offer developers compared to the shiny new toys that Microsoft is so graciously offering, and therefore developers have to use Microsoft’s platform because those Linux-loving hippies Just Don’t Get what it takes to be a developer in today’s world.
Just to give you an idea of how far you are from asking the right questions, here’s some examples of questions you did not ask:
“What are the limitations of current open-standards-based web applications?”
“What sort of applications absolutely can not be written because browsers can’t do X?” (No points for ideas that could be written if only you were smarter.)
“What is X?”
“Could I implement X as a proof-of-concept Firefox extension?”
“Or an IE toolbar?”
“Or a Safari InputManager hack?”
“Would the Mozilla/WebKit/Opera/gasp-OMG-Microsoft developers be amenable to pushing X upstream into the next major release of their browsers?”
“Is X the sort of thing that could be standardized through a group like the WHATWG or the newly re-ignited W3C HTML Working Group?”
— Mark
Precisely, albeit curmudgeonly.
— Joseph
Silverlight is amazing. I tried typing out all the technical reasons, but I realized that my argument can be more clearly explained with the following:
Matt Cutts : Google :: Silverlight : The Future
— Sina
I’m glad someone is talking some level of sense. It appears that MS thought that taking on flash was the way forward. Neither of the vendors seems to understand the joy and beauty of using the html rendering engine.
*sigh*
I fail to understand the point of this rant. People who will be likely to read it will already know what you say here and people whom I suppose you’d like to know about it won’t come to your blog anyway (and wouldn’t care about what you have to say in any case I’m afraid).
Personally I would have preferred a concrete example comparing the three technologies showing that you do no need Apollo or Silverlight in the first place when you can use existing technologies.
@Brett: Did you say “joy and beauty of using the html rendering engine”? Really? Joy? Beauty?? My idea of joy is just about the polar opposite of wrangling with html/css rendering engine crankiness.
— Parand
Odd how posts like this one go up by the smooth faced or the long-in-tooth yet despite all the teeth-gnashing or wistful sighing people still manage to make amazing, money-making websites using the locked-in technology that was supposedly doomed as well as making horrible, unusable, slow and insecure software with the supposed mecca of open-source. Sourceforge is a graveyard of projects high on open-source ideals and quite short on actual code, just as is the commercial landscape.
Point being that despite your rather, ahem, poetic ramblings great software will be made using the frameworks from all of these companies, just as open-source will continue to churn out champs as well. Companies will make millions using these technologies creating useful, functional applications despite all your portents of doom. Entire customer segments will happily use Silverlight, Apollo/Flex, LISP.NET, or FancyPants-based applications and oddly never once say, “You know, I really like this application but I’d like it a lot better if it looked and worked exactly like it does but was instead written using open-source tools.”
Of course people will always think there is a “One True Way”, whether that be a Microsoft, Apple Adobe, Ruby on Rails, or Open-Source vision. Those people can’t be argued with, they have that odd gene that makes people paint their bodies to support a sports team comprised of members that they don’t know and that are rarely even from their same state. They have a certain, very human need to “belong” and so getting behind a software technology becomes their cause and their club. The rest of us just use the tools and frameworks that work best for a task and that provide more fun than frustration along the way to solve puzzles in exchange for cold hard cash.
>Its a relief to see blowback against the hype. How is it that grown technologists dont >understand whythe openness of ajax is a basic part of the value?
Because it’s NOT of value to consumers, only developers. Honestly. In the meantime, you’ll all be screwed over because there is no chance in a million years that IE (the majority browser) is ever going to deliver the rich behaviour of Flash/Silverlight purely through native Javascript/Ajax – will probably be years before it even supports ECMAScript 4.0.
It’s not even all developers either – just the ones with loud voices.
— Anonymous
Hey, anyone remember Blackbird?
Silverlight == Blackbird 2?
— gronk
Shorter Shawn Oster:
“Silverlight! It’s better than random crap on Sourceforge!”
I fully expect to see Microsoft plastering Penn Station with that slogan in a few months.
Shawn Oster covered it brilliantly above.
Though, I’d like to chime in one bit: Show me a viable open source competitor to Apollo or Flash or Silverlight and THEN post your piece. There’s been a LOT of bitching about MS lately without a whole hell of a lot of actual talking about the competition. Instead of despairing in your “Oh! The world is doomed! If only people thought exactly like me!” line of thinking, come out for reasons why we should switch.
I’ve been a MS developer for years, since VB 3, and transitioned to .NET readily. I’ve also dabbled in a lot of different OSS environments, participated in SF.Net projects, and am currently working on a prototype project in RoR. You know what? The OSS development experience, with its loosely overlapping hundreds of parts ISN’T FUN FOR ME. I’d rather have a for-profit IDE that WORKS, does breakpoints out of the box, and includes all of the libraries and utilities and DOCUMENTATION that I need, rather than playing hunt the wumpus amongst 40 google searches to try to find a simple object reference. And on top of that, the .NET community (including MS themselves) are embracing open source ideals and putting a LOT of good controls and libraries out there for free too.
I’m sure there are a lot of people out there that DO like those types of environments. They thrive on discovery, hacking around, and have a lot more time than I do. That doesn’t mean that they are better than me, or that I’m better than them. Face it, in the end we’re all just a bunch of geeks staring into screens all day.
Things aren’t black and white as you try to make them out. Try searching out shades of gray and you’ll be surprised that you have more in common with “them” than you probably care to acknowledge. We aren’t just an army of “Agent Smiths” set on your personal destruction. Nor are we lambs being led to the slaughter.
— Dave
@Dave:
“Things aren’t black and white as you try to make them out. Try searching out shades of gray…”
What I read out of your post is that software licensed as open source is bad and makes everything more difficult while commercial software (especially if it is made by Microsoft) is good and makes life easier.
Smells like black and white thinking to me.
Great rant, Mark. But I think you could have made your openness argument stronger by skipping all the EULA term stuff. The fact is that both Apollo and Silverlight are alpha products, and alpha products often have nasty EULAs. These EULAs are targeted primarily at competitors, not end users. For example, Microsoft doesn’t want anyone to publish results that prove their claims of being 1000x faster than JavaScript are bunk. Next time I recommend sticking to your main point: that Apollo, Flash, and Silverlight are all closed source proprietary products.
I also want to comment on your comment to @lukin: you raise some good questions, but I want to point out the underlying assumption of all your questions: that the browser is the only appropriate and necessary application for interacting with the internet. I think this is a common assumption amongst the web cognoscenti, but it too is an assumption that can be readily challenged.
Thanks, Mark.
That was a beautifuly grumpy summary of the problem. The Internet is about communication and collaboration at all levels. I wonder how many flops Microsoft and Adobe will roll out before they finally hear us, “No, you dingbats — we need truly open standards and you’re just wasting our time.”
— Jim S.
@Andrew: your point about the assumption that the browser is the only appropriate way to access the internet is a key issue. I imagine a web where the core value is in services accessed using REST by a myriad of user interfaces designed to fit specific user needs, scenarios, platforms, etc. In a world of services, UI can be delivered by anyone and everyone.
False info in this article: “Adobe’s own video and audio codecs”.
Audio codecs inside Apollo are common codecs (MP3, ADPCM, WAV). Video codec is VP6 from On2 and its use is under license.
— Alain
“These EULAs are targeted primarily at competitors, not end users.”
I reject your false dichotomy. Your flawed reasoning stems from the belief that there is a definable class of “end users” who demand and deserve fewer rights than the rest of us.
Furthermore, are you implying that the final releases of these platforms will grant *more* rights? That Microsoft will suddenly lift their restrictions on reverse engineering? That Adobe will suddenly find it in their hearts to allow you to install their precious software on non-Adobe-approved devices? I find that difficult to believe.
— Mark
@Mike Deem:
I share your vision. The fundamental deficiency of the web today is that it does not facilitate machine-machine interaction and does not normally return structured data, instead obscuring raw data through its human-targeted presentation.
I don’t know how many times I’ve come across a table and just wished I could trivially dump all the data or filter it. Or how many times I wished I could just query a website’s database in my application. Quick example: I want to write a small app that would tell me when the next bus passes near my house. Unfortunately, that data is in some seriously mangled table with no CSS ids in my city’s transit organization website.
Obviously sites that make their money though advertising wouldn’t be too keen on this idea but anyone else who is just trying to make data or services available should be giving APIs to do so, and returning machine readable data.
I don’t think people currently realize how much richer the web could be.
— jkl
A false dichotomy? I argued that companies like Microsoft and Adobe see a difference between competitors and end users and tailor their alpha EULAs accordingly. Your response is arguing about whether or not such a dichotomy exists in “the real world”. Whether such a distinction actually exists is irrelevant to my argument as long as the people who write the EULAs believe there is such a distinction.
As for whether EULAs can grant additional rights in the final releases, the answer is: yes it does happen, quite frequently. Sometimes because the companies involved get too much negative feedback on their EULAs, and sometimes because there never was any intent for the original EULA to be final. Whether that will actually happen in the case of Silverlight or Apollo I have no idea. But it still seems foolish to be trying to make a rhetorical point based on an alpha EULA when you didn’t need to do so.
@mike deem: I completely agree, though in practice I suspect the web we end up with won’t be 100% REST (or 100% anything, for that matter, with the possible exception of HTTP).
“Whether that will actually happen in the case of Silverlight or Apollo I have no idea.”
So your argument is that I shouldn’t point out how restrictive the EULAs are because the vendors who wrote them *might* make them slightly less restrictive at some undetermined date in the future?
Forgive me for being blunt, but that’s the worst argument I’ve heard yet.
As for the bit about “end users,” yeah, I agree that these vendors see the world that way. That is, in fact, one of the most dangerous things about them. Thanks for bringing it up. One of the fundamental tenets of Microsoft’s “shared source” licenses is that there is a class of “end users” who deserve and demand limited rights, and that you can group people into such categories ahead of time (i.e. before they accept the license). There’s a long history of debate about this topic which you are apparently unaware of, but that’s OK. Look it up; it’s really quite interesting.
— Mark
Let me point out again that I agree with your larger point about these being proprietary runtimes, and was only making a suggestion of how you could have made that larger point more effectively. I am not defending EULAs nor am I unaware of the history of Microsoft’s shared source licenses. Why you feel ad hominem attacks and rhetorical digressions are warranted I cannot fathom, but given the situation I’ll withdraw from the discussion.
Your post reeks of misinformation and assumptions.
Your analysis of Apollo is appallingly inaccurate
— Kyle
“What are the limitations of current open-standards-based web applications?”
They are nowhere near what the desktop UI experience can provide, nor anywhere as fast.
Do they even work with my window manager? No, they are just pages in FireFox or Safari as far as my WM is concerned.
“What sort of applications absolutely can not be written because browsers can’t do X?”
(No points for ideas that could be written if only you were smarter.)
How about appications that work when offline?
How about applications that do image manipulations fast?
How about applications not written in the abomination that is HTML/CSS/XML/AJAX/Javascript + your server side language and that don’t have to work around rendering and behavioral differences between web browsers?
(Minus points for ideas that could be written “only if I was smarter” –as in “only if a bunch of top developers at Google struggle at it”, instead of EASILY).
“What is X?”
Offline operation.
Decent WYSIWIG HTML editor with speed, gusto and less than 30% of current web-based-html-editor quirks and anoying hang ups.
“Could I implement X as a proof-of-concept Firefox extension?”
Even if you could, why mess with a gui (the apps) within a gui (firefox’s)?
Even if you could, only 15% of users have FireFox.
“Or an IE toolbar?”
Ughhh!
“Or a Safari InputManager hack?”
You mean those same “Input Managers” that Apple announced that they will NOT BE PERMITTED in Leopard (much to the dismay of haxie programmers)?
“Would the Mozilla/WebKit/Opera/gasp-OMG-Microsoft developers be amenable to pushing X upstream into the next major release of their browsers?”
Would they? Who cares? Can you wait?
“Is X the sort of thing that could be standardized through a group like the WHATWG or the newly re-ignited W3C HTML Working Group?”
Well, they haven’t standardized anything yet, so how could they have any more luck with X?
Even if Microsoft joins the WHATWG or decides to implement W3C’s HWG specifications we are years away from when they will actually implement it in IE8 (and then we will also have to wait for IE8 to gain mainstream adoption).
Just what exactly will I loose by tying my application with one of these technologies? As far as I know, many third party companies make millions of dollars with applications based on other proprietary technologies, like say .NET, Flash etc.
— foljs
Mark,
I appreciate your skeptical POV and share it – although I feel comfier than you in Adobe’s ability to deliver useful products. As the owner of several of those thousand-dollar Kaleida extra-soft tee-shirts {useful for car waxing these days} I’ve grown leery of vendor-centric development systems with lofty visions of uberness. Snake oil is no lube when your grabbing your ankles.
However, I can’t get paid enough {ironically both from my perspective and the customers} to accomodate the endless hidden foibles of standards-mutant Internet Explorer… not in this out-sourced neo-Depression economy. Now, I don’t mind deploying specific locked-up/locked-in technologies as long as the customer is paying for it and understands the long-term downside… but if they see lower-hassle one-vendor upside and more chances to make money NOW – who’s right?
With the ubiquity of Flash, and the brains of Flex {a decade later its finally comparable to Director} under what appears an improved development system it seems I actually CAN deliver w/o the endless {and I mean that} debugging IE cycles. It’s the XXIst century for Pete’s sake I’m still working stupidly harder just to accommodate Bill Gates. I demand relief from this madness. Apollo/Flash/Flex appears to finally do this – better than anything else I’ve played with. I also trust the quality control at Adobe to deliver in ways MSFT, or open-source “hunt the wumpus” rarely does. I love RoR and soldier-on with it, but Ruby could seriously use a few high-tech angels to fund a non-profit org to catalyze it’s potential, because it can be like pulling teeth to get an aspect to work under current ad-hoc methods – which typically fail to deliver complete solutions anyway.
I’m keen to take the many lessons learned from interactive development spanning two decades and applying it to much of what Apollo would like to cover – if/when Adobe removes the velvet glove I have no intention of being smacked around for protection money to keep my system going. I take my understanding, and ever-so lightly “Adobied” code, and adapt it to the technology du-jour. Same as it ever was.
If Adobe is smart I never feel the need to move decisively away from them unless it’s to something better they offer. Until I get a particular job paying to deploy it, I simply spit in the general direction of MicroSoft and refuse their sacharine siren songs. It’s too late for me to pay any more attention to that fading supernova.
You’re right Mark, best to avoid vendor-specific platforms that will just lock us in. Tomorrow we’ll be returning that Google appliance we purchased so that we aren’t locked into any vendor platforms for our corporate search utilities. Then we’ll cancel our Google Earth subscription because it’s not adding enough value to counter it’s proprietary nature.
I’d suggest you follow Chris’ lead while at Google and be an open source advocate for the positive, spitting such venom will win you little credibility with those that matter.
— Erik
foljs:
Why would we want an image editing application that runs as a web application? Why not just run it as a desktop application?
Why would we want a WYSIWYG HTML editor? The web is not supposed to be WYSIWIG, it is supposed to be semantic. It is supposed be able to rendered in different ways on different browsers and platforms. If you are creating web pages to “look” a certain way, then you are doing it wrong. They are supposed to communicate information globally – not to look identical everywhere.
Your whole premise seems absurd – you want to do things in a really stupid way that doesn’t make sense. And for some reason, you think we should fuck up web standards in order to accomplish something totally stupid and counterproductive. You aren’t doing a very good job of defining what the “problem” is.
— Flaubert Jones
@Andrew: look up the definition of “ad hominem” sometime. I went out of my way to make it clear that my problem was with your argument, not you.
This thread is getting too large to be constructive. New people are coming in and spouting off without even reading my original (admittedly mostly-content-free) rant, much less the comments that preceded their arrival. I think the full range of opinion has been expressed here. The remaining meta-discussion is a bore that the world can do without.
— Mark