Yesterday at 8:19pm, Bryan Petty said:
On 5/9/07, Mike Moore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm kinda sad to see so much cynicism on this list. These are all
terrific,
creative, and exciting technologies. I'm glad that there is so much going
on in this space. I find it very exciting. It may not mean that AJAX is
dead (nor should it), but it is exciting nonetheless.
Thanks for summing this up really well. It's not just about yet
another new standard, they all define new protocols and approaches to
designing clean, efficient, and flexible user interfaces that just
aren't possible with todays standards just like CSS/XHTML and AJAX did
when their time came.
I think new technologies have their place, but at the same time, it is
hard to see many competing technologies that are basically all trying to
do the same thing, none of them really adding value, but just adding a
different toolset/vendor. Hopefully competition will drive a narrowing
of the field.
The other problem I have with so many new technologies is that there are
way to many people (including clients, vendors, consultants, and
programmers) who end up thinking they _need_ one thing or another for very
non-technical reasons. I can't count the number of clients that come to us
(or that I hear about from others) that insist they need Flash or AJAX on
their web site, or PHP5, or some app or another. More often than not,
their reasons for thinking they need it are not only completely
unjustifiable technically, but they're just plain wrong, and usually
counter-productive in their insistence.
Technology should be applied where it solves a problem, provides an
improvement, or is "better" by some measure. When people insist on always
using one solution over another, even when it isn't really an appropriate
solution to their problem in their circumstances, it gets us all into
trouble. The client ends up unhappy, but never wants to admit it was their
own fault for demanding the wrong thing despite expert advice to the
contrary.
Before someone calls me hypocritical for always choosing PHP over ASP,
.NET, Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby for my web apps, let me explain why it
is different. First, my familiarity with PHP gives it a big head start in
being a more efficient solution for me. Second, I have yet to find
something important that the others can do that I can't do with PHP. There
are numerous other reasons why I like PHP, but those two are sufficient. I
simply can solve problems better with PHP than the others, and by choosing
PHP I'm not imposing any additional limitations on myself or significant
extra costs over what other solutions might offer me.
I don't think there's a lot of cynicism on this list, nor that John
Taber's comment was meant that way. I took it as he was pointing out that
the commercially driven products have some definite drawbacks. Beside that
I also felt like he might have been implying a truth I've often found,
that open standards are more often designed with technical reasons taking
the forefront, whereas commercial products often make poor technical
decisions for business reasons. By eliminating the business or
profitability side, open source and open consortiums like w3c don't have
to make technical needs take a back seat to the almighty dollar.
Mac
--
Mac Newbold MNE - Mac Newbold Enterprises, LLC
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.macnewbold.com/
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