While I can understand all your counter points to the GP, it sounds like you are closer to the browser implementation side than the web development side. I'm on the web developer side and I deal mostly with writing web apps. On this side, development is a beast. There have been many improvements and I am grateful for the work that has gone into things, but it's 2009 and we are still writing web apps in a language targeted at documents! It's also sad that I don't see any easy way to make web development easier than grossly misusing the platform. Let me analogize:
Think about how silly it is when you encounter some accountant that has built this elaborate spreadsheet in excel, one with thousands of lines of VB that may even span multiple documents. I think any programmer is going to look at that as a tremendous feat, but also with a great deal of scorn for really extending the platform beyond it's intent. I remember feeling the same thing when gmail first came out. I thought, wow, what masochists!
But here we are years later. The revival of the browser wars has taken a good amount of that pain away, but web development is still a huge pain! Sure it's better than a lot of things, but I pray every night that ten years from now web development doesn't look anything like it does today! I think the div, float, clear model is probably the the source of many of my woes and I don't think that problem can be overemphasized! Perhaps if they chose a simpler rendering model we wouldn't have so many cross-browser issues?
I think that part of the problem is that standard makers are still hoping and pushing for a semantic web. They still see all pages as documents/resources. I agree that many pages are more documents than applications, but we still have applications. Even still, at this point it is still impossible to make any non-simple page design not have layout and style related markup. Many of the new web 2.0 type apps are a single page, which are basically just bootstrappers for their apps. Beyond the hype, there are many principles in web 2.0 apps that are good. Round tripping to the server for full screen renderings is such a drag and I don't understand why we would still want to imply in our standards that should be the SOP. You know this. What I'm talking about and what I am begging for is a spec that makes web apps full citizens of the web rather than its bastard child.
Things I want to when developing web apps:
- Easier layout
- Ability to make custom, first class controls/inputs
- Easier styling, something less complicated than CSS
What sucks hard core is that the reason this is impossible is because everyone is either way too self interested or they are stuck hanging on a vision that is flawed and lacking all touch with reality. It will probably take 5 years to be able to safely use HTML 5, and maybe by then someone will have the balls to make the web the universal platform it ought to be.
And if anyone says that I'm totally missing the point on the web and that if I want to develop apps, I should choose an application platform and not a document platform, I swear I will go ballistic. I mean really, I hope no one really believes that. The web wants to be both an information platform and application platform. I wish we would stop fighting that. The web is more than information and porn.
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