On 11/10/14, 12:45 PM, Dimitri Glazkov wrote:
FWIW, it is perfectly reasonable for us to admit that we as a platform
aim to always be years behind other platforms. But then we should make
this clear and communicate it to developers who keep trying to not give
up on the Web as a viable modern development platform.
Why are developers using the Web as a development platform?
This is a serious question. The Web has all sorts of warts. Why are
people trying to use it?
They're trying to use it because it has several desirable properties
other platforms lack. The ones that come to mind for me are ease of
deployment (e.g. no gatekeepers) and broad availability (having a
"modern" web browser, for some definition of "modern" is pretty
hardware-independent and even reasonably OS-independent). Are there
other compelling reasons people want to use the web?
Adding a framework for proprietary APIs doesn't affect ease of
deployment, but it sure does affect broad availability. That's fine for
experiments or for people who are willing to restrict their audience
(perhaps temporarily), as we've seen with early adoption of web features
in the past. If we go ahead and create a free-for-all of shipping
proprietary APIs, though, I think we risk throwing the broad
availability baby completely out with the bathwater.
There's a tension here, as you point out. I'm interested in resolving
it while keeping it clear that proprietary APIs are temporary stopgaps
that should probably not be relied on for things that are meant to be
broadly available. Because a number of web developers don't seem to
understand the latter; they figure they can just get users to switch to
a different UA (and operating system, and hardware as needed) to use
their site. And if they happen to be a national government, say,
they're even right, but that doesn't make the result good for the Web.
The SSL/crypto story in South Korea is the failure mode here.
-Boris
