HTML5
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Sunday 16 May 2010 00:14
HTML5 is the end of hypertext as we know it, and
browsers have dumbed users and their interfaces
down to the pre-windows era.
The point of windows was that you could run
multiple programs at the same time and each program
could be showing something on it's own part of the
screen. In theory this means that using Object
Linking and Embedding (OLE) you could create a
document in Word and embed images in it that were
seemlessly shown through a dedicated graphics
application and charts that were generated by a
dedicated spreadsheet application, and the
documents in those application could again use OLE
to embed something from a dedicated application.
Every part of your document could be handled by a
dedicated application, independant of the
capabilities of the embedding application. In the
days of DOS before that you could only create a
document with the abilities of a single
application, or get creative in the printing phase
and put placeholders in your text and put the paper
back in the printer to print the images and charts
from other applications in the placeholders between
the text. Windows moved that trick into the
operating system and called it OLE, but in practice
it meant that you'd need a shitload of memory to
run all those applications at the same time, and
the only sharing of those documents was still
through printing a final result because you
couldn't expect the receiving party to have all the
same applications to make up the complete document
with all the embedded stuff. But without the
internet to share documents that was hardly an
issue.
The beauty of HTML was that it was up to the
browser to decide what to do with the tags it
encountered. While some browsers could show an
image inline, others could not and had to open
another application to handle it. And since not all
applications could handle all sorts of image
formats the HTTP client part of the browser was
supposed to negotiate with the HTTP server about
what was the best format to use in that situation.
An important part of the browser was to request all
sorts of document formats and then open them in
dedicated applications so a browser shouldn't be
burdened with the task of having to implement the
handling of every document format on the web. And
using the windows concept dedicated applications
could show their content embedded in the browser.
But the pre-internet era dedicated applications
weren't designed with today's security in mind, and
opening a document directly from the web could lead
to executing malicious code. The application
wouldn't know if a document it had to open came
from a trusted source or some evil website, so the
browser needed to track the sources and sandboxed
the web. Only because providing a user with an
optimized application that has to run outside that
sandbox would give some nasty warnings about a
potential security issue the application is turned
into a website that is crap at being an
application, and maybe a bit less crap with the
help of Flash. Because executables were to easy to
abuse to spread viruses every sort of application
we already had perfectly running in the DOS and
Windows days was translated into a surrogate webapp
version. Which is all pretty useless if that means
all your valuable stuff is inside the sandbox
anyway and outside of the sandbox there is nothing
left to protect. The web turned into a big
workaround for environments that would not allow to
install software, but could not prevent the
functionality of that software being provided
through a website that runs in the already
installed browser, conveniently riddled with ads.
At that point the browser doesn't have much to
decide. In policy restricted corporate environments
and on locked down phones there are no dedicated
applications to handle content better than the
browser would. The browser has to act again like
the single monolithic DOS application that has to
do everything by itself, and HTML5 is trying to
provide a standard to make that happen. HTML5 is
shaped by closed platforms and throws away twenty
years of user interface concepts. W3C seems to have
lost all it's ambition for leading the web to it's
full potential. But what do you expect from a
community that would probably be utterly amazed if
it was shown them at a TED presentation what was
possible fifteen years ago on X pretending it was
invented yesterday in Cupertino?
by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/work/2010/05/16/html5/