I've been doing mobile professionally for well over a decade, and every three months or so something happens in that world which annoys me into thinking that the web is the future again. The times when I've ever actually done anything to look into it - well, mobile's a mess, but the web is a whole other level of horrific.<p>Guess what I spent this afternoon doing.<p>This is why backend server devs seem to actually make it to middle age, whereas front end types go to burning man one time and never come back.
I'm not quite sure why there's such a negative opinion of the front-end web stack around these parts.<p>Yeah, HTML/CSS/JS have lots of warts and hangovers from their respective document-oriented origins. But recent developments have been great, and there are myriad tools to make working with these technologies pretty enjoyable (SASS in particular changes the whole business of styling.)<p>I think that ultimately, building cross-platform, cross-device apps is always going to involve a fair bit of work. The web's still the best tool for doing that, and it's getting better.
I'm confused why WHATWG is concerned about W3C plagiarizing their work on an HTML5 spec, when the alternative is competing specs which drift further apart. Surely interoperability is key here?
<i>"...anything that slows the improvement of the Web means programmers are more likely to devote their energies to writing apps for smartphones and tablets running on Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems instead of HTML5..."</i><p>And rightly so. Being locked into a store worries me much, much less than being locked into using JS and HTML.
I don't care about this the slightest. I would gladly see something that replace the http/html/css/js combination with something more dynamic that involves less text parsing...<p>compiled html with something that resembles protocol buffer would make webapps much smoother.<p>I guess I'm a low level nerd.