HTML5 ===== 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/