HTML5 is done, but two groups still wrestle over Web's future

I&#x27;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&#x27;ve ever actually done anything to look into it - well, mobile&#x27;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&#x27;m not quite sure why there&#x27;s such a negative opinion of the front-end web stack around these parts.<p>Yeah, HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;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&#x27;s still the best tool for doing that, and it&#x27;s getting better.

W3C has been proven useless or harmful time and time again. If it hadn&#x27;t been for WHATWG they&#x27;d be at ICANN level of awfulness by now.

I&#x27;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?

Oh -- I thought the &quot;done&quot; in the title meant &quot;done with, finished, over.&quot; But alas, it was wishful thinking.

<i>&quot;...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&#x27;s iOS and Google&#x27;s Android operating systems instead of HTML5...&quot;</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&#x27;t care about this the slightest. I would gladly see something that replace the http&#x2F;html&#x2F;css&#x2F;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&#x27;m a low level nerd.