- Posts tagged Web Technology
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Google Dart Aiming to Replace Javascript?
Doing some research on the current state of the JavaScript world, I ran across this article from The Register, headlined "Google plan to kill Javascript with Dart, fight off Apple."
I'm skeptical about the underlying news hook and doubtful that Google has plans to replace or kill JavaScript. But the article has a subtext that posits that JS might in essence collapse under its own weight as its use expands and becomes so complex that it is as difficult to learn and use as, say, C#. In that event, if Google has a language waiting in the wings with some development exposure and experience to support it, migration from JS to this new language wouldn't be unthinkable.
I love JavaScript. I've been a huge fan and booster from Day One and I don't see any reason to abandon it at the moment. I figure my days are numbered and by extension so are my coding days and, frankly, I am not psyched at the idea of learning yet another programming language. So regardless of the outcome, I'll probably never learn Dart or Dash or whatever it gets called. JS is apparently the most widely used language on the Web, with many reports suggesting that virtually all "modern" sites using it. One report says that 45% of the top 100,000 ranked sites (per Alexa) use a JS framework. By contrast, PHP, easily the most widely used scripting-side language (though there are many variants of JS that run server side as well) is used on an estimated 20 million sites running on more than 1 million Web servers.
But that doesn't keep me from being intrigued by the notion that a language as deeply entrenched on the Web as JavaScript could be supplanted by a completely re-engineered language that is, as the article put it, "the ability to be tooled."
Hilarous, Raw and Insightful Advice About Your Shopping Cart Design
An old colleague, Randal Schwartz, has come up with a fall-down funny commentary on the common mistakes many if not most folks designing Web shopping cart interactions make. Schwartz, who is Mr. Perl and who has more recently become a significant player in the Smalltalk community, takes apart a fake site he built for the purpose and liberally sprinkles it with hand-written notes identifying the issues he sees. They're issues you've seen, too; I guarantee it.
I just hope they're not issues you've actually caused because Randal's irreverence and his penchant for the precise use of vulgar language might end up offending you. But if you have a thick skin and a warped sense of humor like I do, this is one of those share-it-with-everyone-but-Grandma kind of posts that will probably live long and prosper in Internet history.
Amazon's New Web App: Good, Bad, No Ugly
Amazon.com today released its HTML5 Web version of the Kindle reader and online store combination. Clearly a response to Apple's heavy-handed restrictions on allowing the sale of ancillary content from within apps sold through its App Store, the new Web solution is a welcome addition to my iPad and another strong indicator that HTML5 is a tidal wave that will, without question, ultimately replace proprietary technologies.
That's not to say there isn't some cruft in with the welcome news. The biggest issue for me: Highlighting of text is not supported. This is a very real problem for me; I use this feature constantly and I probably won't be able to switch to the Web app for my reading until this one's fixed.
First, the good stuff.
- It's HTML5! Any time a new HTML5 solution emerges that provides the substantial look and feel of a desktop app, it's one more nail in the coffin of proprietary technologies that have never had a legitimate place on the Open Web.
- The bookshelf experience is clean, familiar and reasonably responsive.
- Books you want to use on your iPad or other browser reader are downloaded in the background quite seamlessly and efficiently.
- The experience of the Kindle store is well-translated from app to browser.
Now, the not-so-good (aka bad) stuff.
- While it's understandable that Amazon can't support browsers (like Firefox) that don't support offline features of HTML5 well or at all, there doesn't seem to be a good reason not to allow the app to run on Safari on iPhone. Yeah, the UI is clearly optimized for the iPad, but still....
- The overall experience is clearly not as smooth as the native app (and couldn't be).
- App switching is quite slow because each time you switch from one app back to the browser-based app, it appears to re-load the entire page. Not sure why they're not doing a better job of caching here, but it could be an HTML5-on-Safari limitation.
- Another problem with app-switching arises if you install the Web app as a desktop icon and switch from another app to that icon rather than to Safari (which runs the icon, of course). Safari remembers where you were before you switched out; the desktop icon/app doesn't. Weird.
- The Kindle Store, while largely well done, has some UI problems. For example, if you go into your account and select a previously purchased item, then try to get it delivered to a specific device, you'll find it maddeningly difficult to tap in exactly the right place on the disclosure diamond next to the option, which then opens a dropdown list from which to make the choice. There are other places where screen real estate has been used unwisely.
- "Sort recent" doesn't, at lest not for books in the cloud as they are initially placed in your bookshelf. My books were not sorted in any order I could determine.
- Installing the app on the desktop went fine but produced what appeared to be a bogus error about installation problems. When I tapped on the inconspicuous error message at the bottom of the screen, it immediately disappeared and the install was clearly fine.
I'm sure I'll uncover other stuff as I use the app in coming days, though for now at least -- until someone forces my hand -- I'll keep using the standalone app as long as I can keep the seamless in-app purchase. I'm sure that at some point Apple will figure out a way to force me to upgrade. Meanwhile, I'll keep an eye on developments in the Web app. But I'm definitely glad to see it arrive.
The Web is Almost Old Enough to Drink in Some States
Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee posted to the alt.hypertext newsgroup a message in response to a request about ongoing research in the field of hypertext technology and announced publicly for the first time the existence of the World Wide Web. You can still read the original thread online.
Like most gigantic ideas, his was a simple and seemingly tame, even limited, notion. It grew over the first few years slowly and methodically and largely invisibly until two years later when the first popularly usable graphical Web browser, Mosaic, was released by researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
I got my first glimpse of Mosaic within a week of its release in the locked office of an engineer at Taligent, the ill-fated joint effort of Apple, IBM and Motorola to create an object-oriented operating system originally code-named Pink at Apple. I caught the vision but all I could do was drool. Soon, some of the original developers teamed up with Silicon Valley money and created what was first called Netscape Navigator. Mozilla is Navigator's successor, a result of a decision to take Navigator Open Source when the proliferation of free browsers made that business an irrational place to invest.
I've built a great deal of my career and what success I've had on the Web without stopping to think that if I'd been 10 years younger and a lot better educated in technology, I might have been one of those pioneers building directly on top of Berners-Lee's genius.
An Old Fashioned Site Done the Old Fashioned Way is Strangely Enjoyable
I'm doing a volunteer project for a friend that involves creating a site based around William Shakespeare and my friend's organization for promoting Shakespeare in our culture.
If you read this corner of the Web very often, you know that I'm usually a bleeding-edge state-of-the-art tools-and-frameworks kinda guy when it comes to creating stuff in technology.
But after I spent a couple of hours deciding which technology to build this site with, I decided that on balance it's a pretty straight-forward site and didn't need a lot of doodads, at least not yet.
So I decided to return to the Days of Yore when I was fortunate enough to be hobnobbing about with the folks who created the whole WWW and when a tool was an editor that was at least somewhat aware of HTML tags. I am building the site using Dreamweaver (CS4), starting from a free and fairly bare-bones template. And so far, it's been a real blast. No new architectures to learn, just HTML and jQuery JS operations, which, while a tad rusty, come rushing back like old friends to an Irish wake. There's something almost visceral about the process. Nothing between me and the site but a tool that really just tries to help rather than taking over whole parts of the project.
I'd forgotten how much fun this could be!
Posterous Image Placement Limit is Lame, Defenseless
Before i moved my blog to Posterous and then decided to create a whole network of single-topic blogs on that service, I used to try to weave photos into my blog posts on my WordPress blog. As a professional writer and long-time journalist, I felt it gave an air of professionalism to my pieces and made them more interesting and enticing to potential readers.
But when I recently decided to add an image to a Posterous blog entry, I became belatedly aware of the lameness with which in-line images are treated. Essentially, they don't support the <img> tag in any way but their own fixed method. I had a three-email exchange with their support team, the takeaway from which was, "Unfortunately, we do not support that [text-wrap around images] in any way at this time. We do hope to add this feature in future updates however." This was after an earlier message in which their support informed me that, "As for the coding being deleted, javascript, flash and other types of coding are currently disabled on Posterous at this time."
But when I recently decided to add an image to a Posterous blog entry, I became belatedly aware of the lameness with which in-line images are treated. Essentially, they don't support the <img> tag in any way but their own fixed method. I had a three-email exchange with their support team, the takeaway from which was, "Unfortunately, we do not support that [text-wrap around images] in any way at this time. We do hope to add this feature in future updates however." This was after an earlier message in which their support informed me that, "As for the coding being deleted, javascript, flash and other types of coding are currently disabled on Posterous at this time."
I had edited the HTML of my post to place the uploaded image differently and to place it in the text stream. Interestingly, doing this in the Posterous editor results in it displaying exactly as I wanted it, but when I save the file, those edits are deleted and replaced with lame-ass HTML code that is reminiscent of the 1990's.
Apple Proves it Cares More About Profit Than Users...Again
Well, Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com both caved in today to Apple's outrageous and ludicrous -- and quite probably illegal -- rules preventing sellers of iOS apps from offering their users the convenience of in-app purchase of books and magazine subscriptions. The high-handed budding monopolists in Cupertino demonstrated once again that their primary passion -- which was once user experience and convenience -- is now squeezing every drop of profit it can out of those whose content drive its platform's successes.
So now i as a heavy user of Amazon.com will no longer be able to search for and buy new books within the Kindle app from which the "Kindle Store" button has been removed in the update announced today. For now, at least, I'm simply declining the upgrade. It's inconvenient for me because now I can't do an "Upgrade All" when it and other apps have updates available, but for now it's my little way of protesting Apple's despotic behavior.
Someone is going to have to convince me this isn't monopolistic behavior. Apple seems to me to clearly be attempting to leverage its dominance of the smartphone/tablet software channel to force developers and vendors to cut it in on revenue they gain from products sold outside the apps they market through Apple. Classic bundling as far as I can tell.
I hope Amazon, like its Canadian counterpart Kobo, decides to write an HTML5-based app and circumvent the Apple App Store altogether. If they do that, I'll download the new app and delete the App Store version in a New York nanosecond. This heavy-handedness will provide app developers even greater incentive to escape the AppStore altogether, particularly when new avenues of distribution like Facebook and its new game platform are appearing with astonishing rapidity.
Heads up, Apple! Your short-sighted greed will cost you dearly if you don't wake up and smell the Web apps.
Amazon Could Rock Tablet World With Smart Marketing
As Amazon.com readies its foray into tablet hardware this fall, the company could leap into a strong second-place dominance -- and perhaps ultimately challenge segment leader Apple -- with the judicious use of marketing offers. Already there are rumors that the new tablet, due out in October as a best guess, may include free access to some Amazon content (probably streaming video on demand) at least during an initial introductory period.
But it occurs to me that if Amazon were to make the cost of its tablet essentially appear to be free by making great marketing offers part of the package, it could change the game entirely.
But it occurs to me that if Amazon were to make the cost of its tablet essentially appear to be free by making great marketing offers part of the package, it could change the game entirely.
Let's say, e.g., that buyers of an Amazon tablet get a 10% or even 15% discount on all Kindle Store purchases until they had reached a limit that would, coincidentally, equal the tablet's purchase price. Or maybe extend that offer to everything offered in the Amazon stores. How about gift certificates whose value totals or exceeds the price of the tablet?
Amazon is in a unique position as a mass retailer offering a tablet to tie the two experiences together in ways that could make the new tablet offer too compelling to be resisted. That could be a highly successful marketing plan.
Pandora Jumps on HTML5 Bandwagon
According to EnGadget, one of the most popular Internet radio station/multimedia sites, Pandora, is ditching Adobe's Flash technology in favor of HTML5 as the new spec's bandwagon effect continues to pick up momentum.
Besides all the technical advantages going with the emerging standard gives Pandora, its developers also report that using HTML5 shaves seconds off page load times. On a site with millions of users opening tens of millions of streams, that represents real savings.
It just keeps getting brighter.
HTML5 Job Offerings Up 34%
According to The Inquirer, demand for HTML5 developers rose 34% in the last quarter. Citing statistics from the Freelancer site, the report indicated that there were 807 postings for developers familiar with the emerging standard in the second quarter compared to 604 in the first quarter.
Although the period gains were larger for HTML5, the number of openings is still dwarfed by the demand for 2,795 iOS and 1,702 Android developers in the same period. The only category of developer demand that showed a steep decline was Windows desktop work, which plummeted by 30%.
