[Sigia-l] Persistence

[Ziya Oz]

David Malouf:

> HOw is Mozilla doing something "special" in their browser any
> different than MS creating a XAML browser or Adobe creating a Flash
> browser.

The "specialty" in this case is persistence. I'm not aware of either MSFT or
Adobe currently offering web browsers with on/offline persistence, are you?
When Apollo ships it will then compete with the Mozilla offering, in that
regard.

As others pointed out, (wrt MSFT/Adobe) the difference here is that because
it's open source, others can use and leverage it. Just as Nokia, for
example, used Apple's Safari/WebKit as the browser for their new generation
of smartphones. In fact, Adobe uses the same Safari/WebKit as the HTML
rendering engine for the upcoming Apollo! The same Safari/WebKit,
incorporating <canvas>, is what powers OS X widgets, and soon iPhone
widgets. Couple that with Mozilla's persistence for on/offline apps and
you've got an incredible development platform that is multi-device, free and
open source.
 
> If IE and Safari and Opera don't follow suit along with all the other
> screen readers out there, doesn't that mean that its just as closed as
> anything else.

That doesn't make much sense. As I explained above, Safari/WebKit is open
source:

<http://webkit.org/>

where as IE is not. Even if something may not have larger marketshare that
doesn't make it "closed" when it's obviously "open".
 
> HTML which was never meant to be an application development environment.

This is an oft-repeated phrase devoid of reality. The original notions of
what HTML (and you should really be talking about HTTP here, too) could be
has of course changed drastically. An unbelievably rich and multi-billion
dollar ecosystem of commerce, entertainment, information and data is run
globally over HTML. Unmatched by anything else for convenience and ubiquity.
And that *is* precisely the strength of HTML: adaptability and
expandability.

> Web applications are a sorry excuse of a hack that have use scalability
> issues.

That's utter nonsense. You can pick any technology and make similar
comments. Take Flash, for example. Its text handling, indexing, large grid
data handling, vector-to-bitmap conversion/caching, just to cite a few, have
been "sorry excuse of a hack that have use scalability issues." Is Adobe
dealing with those issues with Apollo? Sure. Just as web browser folks are
dealing with their own shortcomings, with canvas, Ajax and now persistence
-- the subject of this thread!
 
> Who needs Firefox 3?

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
Kenneth H. Olsen, CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

> Just b/c it is open source doesn't mean that it is ubiquitous
> instantaneously.

That's a strange straw man argument, since I never said anything about
instantaneous ubiquity at all.

In just a couple of years, for example, Firefox 1 and 2 have garnered a
baseline of better than 10%, and in many key domains and some European
countries 35%-40% share. Despite all odds and obvious lack of marketing
resources. Today I can't imagine a web app that doesn't consider Firefox as
one of its deployment platforms, other than a tiny cocoon of IE-only myopia.
Just a couple of years ago that wasn't the case. Think about that. The days
of one company taking half a decade to update its browser are over. So is
the notion that the same company with the current browser dominance can
dictate technology choices.

> In all these years of your defense of HTML-based technologies, you
> never explained why it is good to do HTML.

The answer is self-evident: the web. Used by a billion people.

> You explained why you can do, but not why is it good to do? And "Openness" is
> not enough of an answer.

HTML (and HTTP) can't do everything. Neither can anything else. HTML can
solve a gigantic range of problems. And its shortcomings are being
eliminated year by year: yesterday Ajax and canvas, tomorrow persistence,
soon perhaps vector graphics and GPU acceleration. And so on.

----
Ziya

Heterogeneity happens.