I doubt this or other solutions built by a for-profit businesses in a seemingly open fashion will go far. Facebook is a different case and having some hands on experience with current players, believe them coming up with a better engineered solution.
As for the general concerns, i can add that it's not just 'i know JavaScript and don't want to learn anything else', but rather having some common ground while building products/services on the web. It's probably ok for a big company to support say 3 platforms (web, android & ios), but hardly an option for a small startup or a one man band. Now i'd be more than happy to just stick with web, or at least the solutions bringing the others closer to it (that's by the way where Titanium is pretty weak).
The presence of those consumer/server distinction in ISP's TOS should get waded out at some point. And distributed content is much move viable solution than a centralized ones - probably a troublesome one regarding streaming live data, but one which is potent to utilize network for the task at hand more harmoincally. And at the same time it'll bring all the benefits of distributed systems (as well as downsides) - e.g. you could stream a video of yours on your own website and not rely on likes of youtube.
I pretty much agree with the reasoning how templating doesn't promote anything other than separation of languages. It always frowned how people emphasised templates being logic-less, which imo oversimplifies the matter.
Yet i still don't seem comfortable writing the markup in js. Even react's JSX preprocessor doesn't seem right to me.
I can't stress enough how discouraging is the fact that browsers rely on so complex standard body. And current way they evolve leave little hope. It definitely benefits web in a way, but rising complexity makes for a security nightmare and i wonder how close it brings browsers as a kind of software to limits of sanity and comprehension.
> It definitely benefits web in a way, but rising complexity makes for a security nightmare and i wonder how close it brings browsers as a kind of software to limits of sanity and comprehension.
Note that this is much of the idea behind Rust (which is used by this series): browsers are too large and difficult for humans to guard against the presence of vulnerabilities, so we use software (i.e. compilers) to do it. Compilers have a much longer attention span than humans do.
Sandboxing can also achieve this, although at a much more coarse-grained level.
As much as i love anything that aids fighting the complexity, i think that it's best to address the root cause.
That said, i don't have any strategy at hand regarding browser complexity, but i believe as it gets more prominent, the change will come. At least i hope that the browser i'll be running in 5 years would be a saner piece of software.
Yes, it feels like it's only getting more complex and for the sake of somewhat limited use cases (like your basic JSON/HTML editor apps, or displaying data fastly).
What I'd like to see is support for more general, compiler supporting infrastructure. A platform where you could develop your domain specific languages and data structures that are then transformed to native environment. Kind of like JavaScript is used as a transpiler target, but you still need to have loads of functionality on top of browser base.
Then there could be ways to tag your data with semantics (this text is a heading, this is a link), accessibility, editorial intents (text select, copy/paste) that browser could use to display for specific devices and provide interaction (typing, touch).
Since browser is a place to present and produce almost everything digital, not one standard body nor a standard can provide this. HTML/JS/CSS was borne into what it is today for few, narrowly scoped purposes and is creakingly, laboriously converted into different thing each time you open a web app.
Just got an idea - one can make new games using some of the engines supported by ScummVM. That way you'd be able to play it almost anywhere. Will try to look into it.
Excuse me, but where's my drm-free ebook? Have to hate all those publishers selling drm-crippled books which i'd really love to read. I just don't get it.
