On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 21:31 -0600, Jason D. Clinton wrote: > On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 9:18 PM, Jim Gettys <[email protected]> wrote: > The combination of technologies going under the name "HTML 5" > have made/are making web technology based applications finally > competitive with those built using conventional toolkits such > as Qt, GTK+, and the Windows and Mac equivalents. > > This provides a major opportunity; but I have seen little > thought or discussion of how Gnome can/should take advantage > of this. > > > That's why Shell is JS and CSS.
I think you missed the point on this one. Sure, Shell uses JavaScript, and CSS, but the real power of HTML5 is on the whole engine/standard, not on the languages you use to interact with it. We can do all kinds of effects, media playing, very complex UIs, client-side storage, and databases, 3D, "multi-threaded" workers, workers that share work between pages, all of that you can do in HTML these days, and all of them interact very seamlessly with the others, so you can apply transitions to media, and 3D. Things we could barely do with our platform until recently (if we can at all right now) are already possible in a modern web rendering engine, and that is a scary thought. All of that is available through a standardized API[1] that loads of developers are already beginning to learn, and that we could perhaps take advantage of in our platform. We have at least 2 very good engines to work with, and thinking of ways to use their power to our advantage. Shell could just as well use Python, and some non-standard theming tool. JS and CSS only help leverage web developer programming/theming knowledge of the languages, not the power of what HTML5 and its standard APIs are providing. I think what Jim Gettys says is a very important question, and we should factor it into our thoughts for the future. [1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html See you, -- Gustavo Noronha Silva <[email protected]> GNOME Project _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
