Been A While ...

It's been a while since I wrote anything. I've been busy making the world a better place (hopefully).

The recent "Stop Pushing The Web Forward" post by PPK has been interesting, with lots of people sticking their oar in and having opinions. I broadly agree with what the Dutchman says. Basically, I think that 'app-like' functionality belongs in apps, and hyperlinked document-type functionality belongs in hyperlinked-documents (aka the web).

Case in point - WebGL. This is no criticism of anyone working on it, it's incredibly impressive. But. Why? What is it for? To make games / applications in a browser? That's the reason we have native apps. Sure, it's great if they're standardised. Totally down with that. But why standardised using a set of protocols designed for document transfer? Surely there's a better way to do that. Surely. It's a beautiful bit of technology, but the web shouldn't be competing with apps on that, it should be showing why native apps are absolutely idiotic for document transfer (eg news apps). That is what the web is for, and what it's good at.

So I guess in some sense, I think we should push the web backwards and really assess what it is we're trying to achieve. But hey ho, doubt that view will get a huge amount of support.