HMTL and Broken Promises
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So the big selling point of HTML is that it is supposed to be the 'write once, run everywhere' savior of the development world. Ever since I started in development the hope and dream of the hucksters selling this nonsense has been a nearly here future state of total bliss - which never really seems to arrive. From the beginning I've doubted this vision for one reason: There are too many cooks in the kitchen. What I mean is that different bodies have control over every aspect of the development environment. The OS may be by Microsoft, the browser by Google, the Java run time by Oracle, the HTML standard by the W3C... and so on - all businesses that are, interestingly enough, competing with one another in a cut throat game of survival. I find this frustrating because instead of getting better the situation is getting worse. Chrome and Firefox push out new versions on a near weekly basis, and Microsoft, attempting to keep up, is starting to push out new, substantially altered versions at a much quicker pace. So now, where I work, we have to keep users on IE 9 because enterprise level software (a website) doesn't work in anything but IE 9. Far from being write once, run anywhere, we instead have this nightmare of re-certifying browsers at an ever increasing pace. We also have to 'fix' machines where the user has upgraded a browser to a higher version than what is supported. Usually an additional version of a browser is out before the last version is certified. It's a nightmare. Compare that with my .net application that I wrote in 2003 - now 10 years old - that continues to hum along, even in Windows 7, with no changes. Someone stop the insanity.
MehGerbil wrote:
the big selling point of HTML is that it is supposed to be the 'write once, run everywhere' savior of the development world
actually, that was Java. HTML + JS became what Java was supposed to be because Java applets were too much hassle.
MehGerbil wrote:
Compare that with my .net application that I wrote in 2003 - now 10 years old - that continues to hum along, even in Windows 7, with no changes.
many applications written in 2003 had to be substantially changed, to keep up with MS's ever-increasing user restrictions around things like the registry and file system. but yes, writing applications in HTML + JS + toolkitOfTheMonth to run on an ever-expanding universe of browsers is a challenge. that's why the jobs pay well.
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Dennis E White wrote:
yes but does that application developed over 10 years ago have the potential of running on virtually any modern platform?
This is the HTML selling point that really isn't working out terribly well for any application more complicated than a website that catalogs LOLCats images. The first problem is that my applications don't have to run on virtually any modern platform - it did manage to jump up through a couple of OS changes over the past 10 years and that meets our needs. The second problem is that nobody is going to develop a substantial business application that works equally well on a smartphone, and iPad, and a desktop without a great deal of UI branching so even for HTML the 'virtually any modern platform' is misleading - not without a great deal of work to make it presentable
Dennis E White wrote:
that application you wrote 10 years ago I am sure didn't run on windows 95. a technology that using your dates was less than 10 years old. even if it did so it's abilities were limited because of how well .Net ran on 95 boxes.
Of course everything will eventually break as we move forward. My point is 10 years is much greater than the 6 month window it takes for the next browser release to break web based business applications.
MehGerbil wrote:
The second problem is that nobody is going to develop a substantial business application that works equally well on a smartphone, and iPad, and a desktop without a great deal of UI branching so even for HTML the 'virtually any modern platform' is misleading - not without a great deal of work to make it presentable
In the world of web development we call this a responsive UI and yes a lot of business applications are being developed with this in mind. :)
MehGerbil wrote:
browser release to break web based business applications.
a majority of the time I find it is the web developer that did something wrong in the first place and not the browser.
you want something inspirational??
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MehGerbil wrote:
Compare that with my .net application that I wrote in 2003
yes but does that application developed over 10 years ago have the potential of running on virtually any modern platform?
MehGerbil wrote:
enterprise level software (a website) doesn't work in anything but IE 9
blame the developer of the software and not the browser or the OS. properly developed software for the web should run on any modern browser. should I as a developer for a website though assure that my work run on older versions of IE (6, 7, 8)? Well that really depends on the features that my users are requesting doesn't it? as technology progresses we will continually leave things of old behind in the dust because of the expectations of what needs to be done today/tomorrow. with technology progressing at faster paces than before this point will only become more noticeable. that application you wrote 10 years ago I am sure didn't run on windows 95. a technology that using your dates was less than 10 years old. even if it did so it's abilities were limited because of how well .Net ran on 95 boxes.
you want something inspirational??
Dennis E White wrote:
but does that application developed over 10 years ago have the potential of running on virtually any modern platform?
I'd rather run programs inside the DosBox VM than inside a browser that's being treated as a VM but isn't capable of properly fulfilling the role.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The solution is not to write stuff that runs inside a browser. Browsers are being treated like virtual machines, these days, where you stop using your computer to do anything, and let the browser handle everything -- all HTML5 and its ilk have added to the mix is huge memory consumption. I used to complain when IE4 used up 12 Meg of memory. Now, the average web-site requires fifty times that much, to run 15 different apps for advertising, tracking, cutesy graphics/layout stuff, and even for doing very basic level display-type stuff. The browser has become the hammer that is the only tool in too many people's hands.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
Where I am at the moment we are writing the in-house business apps in winforms. We have agonised over whether to use ASP.NET and the conclusion we reached was that different browsers etc meant that we have more control if we enforce winforms. We are going to be looking at WPF at some point.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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So the big selling point of HTML is that it is supposed to be the 'write once, run everywhere' savior of the development world. Ever since I started in development the hope and dream of the hucksters selling this nonsense has been a nearly here future state of total bliss - which never really seems to arrive. From the beginning I've doubted this vision for one reason: There are too many cooks in the kitchen. What I mean is that different bodies have control over every aspect of the development environment. The OS may be by Microsoft, the browser by Google, the Java run time by Oracle, the HTML standard by the W3C... and so on - all businesses that are, interestingly enough, competing with one another in a cut throat game of survival. I find this frustrating because instead of getting better the situation is getting worse. Chrome and Firefox push out new versions on a near weekly basis, and Microsoft, attempting to keep up, is starting to push out new, substantially altered versions at a much quicker pace. So now, where I work, we have to keep users on IE 9 because enterprise level software (a website) doesn't work in anything but IE 9. Far from being write once, run anywhere, we instead have this nightmare of re-certifying browsers at an ever increasing pace. We also have to 'fix' machines where the user has upgraded a browser to a higher version than what is supported. Usually an additional version of a browser is out before the last version is certified. It's a nightmare. Compare that with my .net application that I wrote in 2003 - now 10 years old - that continues to hum along, even in Windows 7, with no changes. Someone stop the insanity.
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Clearly you need to start programming for the future, luckily HTML9 Boilerstrap[^] is here to help! (Also, if you're bored, go check their bug reports on Github, great for a laugh.)
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MehGerbil wrote:
that continues to hum along, even in Windows 7, with no changes.
Yes, but at what expense ? This backward compatibility requires a bloated OS. Your software should work for definite versions of browsers. It is not a requirement to be able to anticipate the future, e.g. new browser updates. I find the constant re-certification, even at high pace, better than having to drag a lot of old code in the browser just for backwards-compatibility. Plus, with adequate and automated unit-testing, the effort of re-certifying should not be that much, since the delta between two browser versions is not that great. At least, it is much smaller than modifications between two OSes, for instance.
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus Do not feed the troll ! - Common proverb
Rage wrote:
It is not a requirement to be able to anticipate the future, e.g. new browser updates.
Unfortunately that will not work at all with a consumer facing front end since the browsers now automatically update. And on the corporate side, to not update, is to allow for the potential that security holes might be exploited.
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So the big selling point of HTML is that it is supposed to be the 'write once, run everywhere' savior of the development world. Ever since I started in development the hope and dream of the hucksters selling this nonsense has been a nearly here future state of total bliss - which never really seems to arrive. From the beginning I've doubted this vision for one reason: There are too many cooks in the kitchen. What I mean is that different bodies have control over every aspect of the development environment. The OS may be by Microsoft, the browser by Google, the Java run time by Oracle, the HTML standard by the W3C... and so on - all businesses that are, interestingly enough, competing with one another in a cut throat game of survival. I find this frustrating because instead of getting better the situation is getting worse. Chrome and Firefox push out new versions on a near weekly basis, and Microsoft, attempting to keep up, is starting to push out new, substantially altered versions at a much quicker pace. So now, where I work, we have to keep users on IE 9 because enterprise level software (a website) doesn't work in anything but IE 9. Far from being write once, run anywhere, we instead have this nightmare of re-certifying browsers at an ever increasing pace. We also have to 'fix' machines where the user has upgraded a browser to a higher version than what is supported. Usually an additional version of a browser is out before the last version is certified. It's a nightmare. Compare that with my .net application that I wrote in 2003 - now 10 years old - that continues to hum along, even in Windows 7, with no changes. Someone stop the insanity.
Teach your crappy developers to write proper web pages? not that hard imho.
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So the big selling point of HTML is that it is supposed to be the 'write once, run everywhere' savior of the development world. Ever since I started in development the hope and dream of the hucksters selling this nonsense has been a nearly here future state of total bliss - which never really seems to arrive. From the beginning I've doubted this vision for one reason: There are too many cooks in the kitchen. What I mean is that different bodies have control over every aspect of the development environment. The OS may be by Microsoft, the browser by Google, the Java run time by Oracle, the HTML standard by the W3C... and so on - all businesses that are, interestingly enough, competing with one another in a cut throat game of survival. I find this frustrating because instead of getting better the situation is getting worse. Chrome and Firefox push out new versions on a near weekly basis, and Microsoft, attempting to keep up, is starting to push out new, substantially altered versions at a much quicker pace. So now, where I work, we have to keep users on IE 9 because enterprise level software (a website) doesn't work in anything but IE 9. Far from being write once, run anywhere, we instead have this nightmare of re-certifying browsers at an ever increasing pace. We also have to 'fix' machines where the user has upgraded a browser to a higher version than what is supported. Usually an additional version of a browser is out before the last version is certified. It's a nightmare. Compare that with my .net application that I wrote in 2003 - now 10 years old - that continues to hum along, even in Windows 7, with no changes. Someone stop the insanity.
I'd settle for FF not breaking something every release. Chrome and IE manage to pull it off. I've had a web forms app running for years no problems, then all of a sudden some user has their install of FF update and some feature on my site broke. 2 days later FF released another update and everything went back to normal. If one of the major browsers cant be bothered to keep its behavior consistent from version to version how do we have a hope of writing apps that work everywhere short of going back to the old "Click for IE" "Click for netscape" buttons. I've never had that issue with Chrome and what broke wasn't even related to an item on their change list for the new version.
Please remember to rate helpful or unhelpful answers, it lets us and people reading the forums know if our answers are any good.
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So the big selling point of HTML is that it is supposed to be the 'write once, run everywhere' savior of the development world. Ever since I started in development the hope and dream of the hucksters selling this nonsense has been a nearly here future state of total bliss - which never really seems to arrive. From the beginning I've doubted this vision for one reason: There are too many cooks in the kitchen. What I mean is that different bodies have control over every aspect of the development environment. The OS may be by Microsoft, the browser by Google, the Java run time by Oracle, the HTML standard by the W3C... and so on - all businesses that are, interestingly enough, competing with one another in a cut throat game of survival. I find this frustrating because instead of getting better the situation is getting worse. Chrome and Firefox push out new versions on a near weekly basis, and Microsoft, attempting to keep up, is starting to push out new, substantially altered versions at a much quicker pace. So now, where I work, we have to keep users on IE 9 because enterprise level software (a website) doesn't work in anything but IE 9. Far from being write once, run anywhere, we instead have this nightmare of re-certifying browsers at an ever increasing pace. We also have to 'fix' machines where the user has upgraded a browser to a higher version than what is supported. Usually an additional version of a browser is out before the last version is certified. It's a nightmare. Compare that with my .net application that I wrote in 2003 - now 10 years old - that continues to hum along, even in Windows 7, with no changes. Someone stop the insanity.
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MehGerbil wrote:
The second problem is that nobody is going to develop a substantial business application that works equally well on a smartphone, and iPad, and a desktop without a great deal of UI branching so even for HTML the 'virtually any modern platform' is misleading - not without a great deal of work to make it presentable
In the world of web development we call this a responsive UI and yes a lot of business applications are being developed with this in mind. :)
MehGerbil wrote:
browser release to break web based business applications.
a majority of the time I find it is the web developer that did something wrong in the first place and not the browser.
you want something inspirational??
Dennis E White wrote:
In the world of web development we call this a responsive UI
I don't care what they call it in your world. It's rubbish.
Dennis E White wrote:
a majority of the time I find it is the web developer that did something wrong in the first place and not the browser.
That's the way you define wrong. The majority of the time I find it works perfectly in browser x, and y, but not in browser z. That's not wrong, that's requiring voodoo magic, and it's a poor way to be forced to do things.
If it moves, compile it
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MehGerbil wrote:
Compare that with my .net application that I wrote in 2003
yes but does that application developed over 10 years ago have the potential of running on virtually any modern platform?
MehGerbil wrote:
enterprise level software (a website) doesn't work in anything but IE 9
blame the developer of the software and not the browser or the OS. properly developed software for the web should run on any modern browser. should I as a developer for a website though assure that my work run on older versions of IE (6, 7, 8)? Well that really depends on the features that my users are requesting doesn't it? as technology progresses we will continually leave things of old behind in the dust because of the expectations of what needs to be done today/tomorrow. with technology progressing at faster paces than before this point will only become more noticeable. that application you wrote 10 years ago I am sure didn't run on windows 95. a technology that using your dates was less than 10 years old. even if it did so it's abilities were limited because of how well .Net ran on 95 boxes.
you want something inspirational??
Dennis E White wrote:
blame the developer of the software and not the browser or the OS. properly developed software for the web should run on any modern browser.
as I stated in the other post, this is misinformation. Any software that requires you to know all that voodoo is bad.
Dennis E White wrote:
should I as a developer for a website though assure that my work run on older versions of IE (6, 7, 8)? Well that really depends on the features that my users are requesting doesn't it?
That is a moot point when you don't get to decide.
If it moves, compile it
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So the big selling point of HTML is that it is supposed to be the 'write once, run everywhere' savior of the development world. Ever since I started in development the hope and dream of the hucksters selling this nonsense has been a nearly here future state of total bliss - which never really seems to arrive. From the beginning I've doubted this vision for one reason: There are too many cooks in the kitchen. What I mean is that different bodies have control over every aspect of the development environment. The OS may be by Microsoft, the browser by Google, the Java run time by Oracle, the HTML standard by the W3C... and so on - all businesses that are, interestingly enough, competing with one another in a cut throat game of survival. I find this frustrating because instead of getting better the situation is getting worse. Chrome and Firefox push out new versions on a near weekly basis, and Microsoft, attempting to keep up, is starting to push out new, substantially altered versions at a much quicker pace. So now, where I work, we have to keep users on IE 9 because enterprise level software (a website) doesn't work in anything but IE 9. Far from being write once, run anywhere, we instead have this nightmare of re-certifying browsers at an ever increasing pace. We also have to 'fix' machines where the user has upgraded a browser to a higher version than what is supported. Usually an additional version of a browser is out before the last version is certified. It's a nightmare. Compare that with my .net application that I wrote in 2003 - now 10 years old - that continues to hum along, even in Windows 7, with no changes. Someone stop the insanity.
The closest I've seen to "write once, run anywhere" was C code with a text mode windowing library (similar to curses). Nothing else has even come close.
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Dennis E White wrote:
blame the developer of the software and not the browser or the OS. properly developed software for the web should run on any modern browser.
as I stated in the other post, this is misinformation. Any software that requires you to know all that voodoo is bad.
Dennis E White wrote:
should I as a developer for a website though assure that my work run on older versions of IE (6, 7, 8)? Well that really depends on the features that my users are requesting doesn't it?
That is a moot point when you don't get to decide.
If it moves, compile it
loctrice wrote:
software that requires you to know all that voodoo is bad.
and by voodoo you would be referring to... HTML, CSS, Javascript?? well if you are going to be a web developer don't you think it makes sense that you learn about the technologies that you are developing for?
loctrice wrote:
moot point when you don't get to decide.
the point was that customers decide not the developers.
you want something inspirational??
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Dennis E White wrote:
In the world of web development we call this a responsive UI
I don't care what they call it in your world. It's rubbish.
Dennis E White wrote:
a majority of the time I find it is the web developer that did something wrong in the first place and not the browser.
That's the way you define wrong. The majority of the time I find it works perfectly in browser x, and y, but not in browser z. That's not wrong, that's requiring voodoo magic, and it's a poor way to be forced to do things.
If it moves, compile it
loctrice wrote:
your world
not my world... this is the world of web development in general.
loctrice wrote:
That's the way you define wrong. The majority of the time I find it works perfectly in browser x, and y, but not in browser z. That's not wrong, that's requiring voodoo magic, and it's a poor way to be forced to do things.
"It works on my machine." that type of mentality from developers is rubbish. there is no voodoo magic occurring when a developer is doing their job properly.
you want something inspirational??
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loctrice wrote:
software that requires you to know all that voodoo is bad.
and by voodoo you would be referring to... HTML, CSS, Javascript?? well if you are going to be a web developer don't you think it makes sense that you learn about the technologies that you are developing for?
loctrice wrote:
moot point when you don't get to decide.
the point was that customers decide not the developers.
you want something inspirational??
by voodoo I mean all the hoops you jump through to make sure it works here, there , and everywhere. We can single out jquery just for an example, but this goes for other things like css as well: You have to know things like IE doesn't implement string.trim() until IE9, and there is some $(object).each() issues, IE8 can't replace an attribute's value unless it's done in a certain manner, etc.. Those types of things are voodoo. It's not knowing the language or technology, it's knowing all the wonkiness to get it to actually work across platforms.
If it moves, compile it
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loctrice wrote:
your world
not my world... this is the world of web development in general.
loctrice wrote:
That's the way you define wrong. The majority of the time I find it works perfectly in browser x, and y, but not in browser z. That's not wrong, that's requiring voodoo magic, and it's a poor way to be forced to do things.
"It works on my machine." that type of mentality from developers is rubbish. there is no voodoo magic occurring when a developer is doing their job properly.
you want something inspirational??
I don't think so. I think not complaining about it, and just accepting it as part of the territory contributes to a larger problem. We shouldn't allow ourselves to write code that way, and we should expect our products and platforms to behave better. This, to me, is like saying you should not be able to rely on the built in .net framework stuff to work across different versions of MS. You would have to know all the voodoo hacks, not only just to check for the different versions, but to workaround when they were found. Even the spawning of things like jquery, and other types of libs, goes (I think) to my point. It's rediculous to have to keep track of all that voodoo just to be a developer. That goes beyond job security. The point of all those kits was to abstract (at least a good deal) of all that complication away. Because it's rediculous, and it shouldn't matter as part of the job of a developer.
If it moves, compile it
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So the big selling point of HTML is that it is supposed to be the 'write once, run everywhere' savior of the development world. Ever since I started in development the hope and dream of the hucksters selling this nonsense has been a nearly here future state of total bliss - which never really seems to arrive. From the beginning I've doubted this vision for one reason: There are too many cooks in the kitchen. What I mean is that different bodies have control over every aspect of the development environment. The OS may be by Microsoft, the browser by Google, the Java run time by Oracle, the HTML standard by the W3C... and so on - all businesses that are, interestingly enough, competing with one another in a cut throat game of survival. I find this frustrating because instead of getting better the situation is getting worse. Chrome and Firefox push out new versions on a near weekly basis, and Microsoft, attempting to keep up, is starting to push out new, substantially altered versions at a much quicker pace. So now, where I work, we have to keep users on IE 9 because enterprise level software (a website) doesn't work in anything but IE 9. Far from being write once, run anywhere, we instead have this nightmare of re-certifying browsers at an ever increasing pace. We also have to 'fix' machines where the user has upgraded a browser to a higher version than what is supported. Usually an additional version of a browser is out before the last version is certified. It's a nightmare. Compare that with my .net application that I wrote in 2003 - now 10 years old - that continues to hum along, even in Windows 7, with no changes. Someone stop the insanity.
MehGerbil wrote:
So the big selling point of HTML is that it is supposed to be the 'write once, run everywhere' savior of the development world.
I don't remember HTML offering this, Java did it, but it mostly failed; actually the 'write once, run everywhere' motto is rubbish, so any technology offering this is doomed to fail. By the way, HTML is a standard meant to display documents with a known markup language that is able to link between them, so as you see HTML is being taken far away from its original purpose, anyway, your rant is misdirected and must be directed to the real culprits, the web browsers.
CEO at: - Rafaga Systems - Para Facturas - Modern Components for the moment...
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So the big selling point of HTML is that it is supposed to be the 'write once, run everywhere' savior of the development world. Ever since I started in development the hope and dream of the hucksters selling this nonsense has been a nearly here future state of total bliss - which never really seems to arrive. From the beginning I've doubted this vision for one reason: There are too many cooks in the kitchen. What I mean is that different bodies have control over every aspect of the development environment. The OS may be by Microsoft, the browser by Google, the Java run time by Oracle, the HTML standard by the W3C... and so on - all businesses that are, interestingly enough, competing with one another in a cut throat game of survival. I find this frustrating because instead of getting better the situation is getting worse. Chrome and Firefox push out new versions on a near weekly basis, and Microsoft, attempting to keep up, is starting to push out new, substantially altered versions at a much quicker pace. So now, where I work, we have to keep users on IE 9 because enterprise level software (a website) doesn't work in anything but IE 9. Far from being write once, run anywhere, we instead have this nightmare of re-certifying browsers at an ever increasing pace. We also have to 'fix' machines where the user has upgraded a browser to a higher version than what is supported. Usually an additional version of a browser is out before the last version is certified. It's a nightmare. Compare that with my .net application that I wrote in 2003 - now 10 years old - that continues to hum along, even in Windows 7, with no changes. Someone stop the insanity.
You're absolutely right. It isn't going to get any better. Gone are the days when Bell Labs, PARC and others would develop an idea and give it to the world -- already figured out and documented. C, Unix, the transistor, Ethernet, the GUI, touch-screens, mice and many other ideas were created by one developer and then documented and given to the world. The think-tanks are gone. They didn't make any money. Today's bottom-line won't tolerate loss. It's all about the money and to a lesser extent, power. You can't get other companies to adopt anything unless they have a hand in it. Technology is being run by gangsters who all "need a piece of the action". Constant change and up-in-the-air standards work best for big companies to maintain a strangle-hold on an industry which can be turned on its head by one person who has a brilliant idea. We can't have that... Engineers aren't artists anymore, they're mechanics. I first felt this when C++ hit the scene. They hijacked the name because nobody would consider a language that didn't start with C. But C++ is a high-level language which has little to do with C. Today many universities don't teach C any more, forget about assembler. Committees redefine it constantly. Donald Knuth said, "We shouldn't stop when we find a solution, we should continue until we find the simplest solution". Odd how C remains unchanged and very effective while C++ continues to need more committee-based "features" and changes. HTML is treated the same by the same people.