Comments on: HTML Sucks for Rich Web Applications

By: tom

tom — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:01:50 +0000

Hi Wim - the template language you will find most useful probably depends on the platform you develop for. I’d recommend taking a look at Apache Velocity (Java), Erb (Ruby) or even the command-line PHP interpreter. All of these can be used to generate CSS, although they’re more commonly used to generate HTML. Please be aware of the tradeoff of complexity for flexibility when using template languages to generate CSS.

Aaron: Exactly. HTML is being stretched and contorted in the absence of a similarly ubiquitous alternative suited to pixel perfection. Worse - developers, employers and end-users often pay the price for it.

All that said, I’m excited to see what happens in this space.

By: AaronZ

AaronZ — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 04:38:04 +0000

I too am waiting for the DHTML killer. I have been watching Silverlight with some interest. But while WCF is getting solid, WPF is soft and squishy. I am not sure what the solution is. I try and convince clients that Web Apps (which is what I do) that require the latest IE is to be expected.

I have avoided eCommerce which would necessitate cross browser functionality up to now but my current client’s CEO uses (gulp) Safari and seems to want him and the other two Safari users to be able to use his web app.

HTML was never meant to support the kind of tight, pixel perfect, requirements some clients want. With that said, it’s no excuse for an ugly UI.

Soooo……perhaps this is just co-miseration.

Oh yeah, and “Eddie Pasternak”, get a life. This is a blog fer cryinoutloud. Jeeeesh!

By: Wim

Wim — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:43:30 +0000

Hi Tom,

Would you mind pointing me to the $TEMPLATE_LANGUAGE you mentioned? I’m interested and google doesn’t want to tell me. She’s bitching something about me fondling other search engines….

Kind Regards,

Wim.

By: tom

tom — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 11:34:50 +0000

Hi Eddie - what browser are you using? It works fine for me in Firefox. Perhaps you’re referring to the preformatted text?

Anyway, I’m not looking for an argument: by all means, use HTML where it makes sense. If you disagree with what I have to say, feel free to continue hacking around HTML’s shortcomings despite better technologies being available for rich application UIs. I really don’t know why the HTML die-hards are so dogmatic about using HTML for *everything* on the web: the simple fact is it’s not always suited to certain types of application - even if that application happens to be delivered over HTTP.

On the topic of this site’s HTML, I couldn’t possibly take the credit for this wonderful design. It’s a Wordpress template called “Palaam” by Sadish Balasubramanian - a man with far more aesthetic sense than I could ever muster. I replaced the banner image with something a little less American, but other than that I’ve barely touched it.

Steve: that’s the beauty of some of the stuff that’s coming out of Adobe, Microsoft and Sun - the presentation tier is *designed* to be able to take advantage of modern, more complicated service tiers whether that be via XML-RPC, SOAP or REST. You’re largely forced to separate your presentation code from your business logic because the technology promotes such an architecture.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 19:35:34 +0000

Yeah, I’m really starting to wonder why so many of us gave up on rich client apps to begin with. The web automatically made linking easy of course, and gave us cross-platform for free, but rich client apps can do the same with Java and (to a lesser degree) mono on the front end, being driven by RESTful backends which would make them more “web-principled” than most web apps.

By: Eddie Pasternak

Eddie Pasternak — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 16:40:23 +0000

Of course, when I make my browser window smaller, your text doesn’t flow.
Instead, the ends of the lines are cut off. This is a very common mistake that
newbies make. Please learn HTML and fix this.