Mike Stachowiak

Keith is a very bright guy but he’s going to be on the wrong side of history regarding native apps. It will take a little while, but HTML5 will emerge as the dominate app format, much as the web emerged as the dominate format over native desktop applications (less a few computationally intensive applications, eg Photoshop).

Yes, native apps have long held the advantage over HTML5 in terms of functionality and performance, but that gap is closing quickly. HTML5 apps now have access to most native functionality/components - accelerometers, multitouch interfaces, geolocation, camera, contacts list, compass, local storage, etc. The performance of HTML5 is still lagging - multitouch interactions are very clunky and native hardware acceleration doesn’t exist - but that won’t last forever. The browsers on phones will and are getting better, multitouch will improve, and it won’t be long before we see native hardware acceleration needed for games in browsers (Apple will have to keep up with Google on this one to stay competitive).

Developers crave a write-once-run-anywhere application ecosystem - one in which widely supported standards rule the day. The traditional web has taken off because of this paradigm (companies flourish from low development costs and ubiquitous support). If every company has to develop 10 flavors of their application (iOS 3, iOS4, Android 1.3-3.0, Blackberry, etc), everybody suffers. Fewer apps of lower quality for consumers to enjoy.

As a consumer of apps, I hope Keith is dead wrong.

While I respect the efforts the WC3 has put forth drafting the HTML5 specification (how could I not, a ‘Stachowiak’ co-chairs the working group), it’s time to move forward, not hold off.  HTML5 development began in 2004 and final approval of the spec isn’t expected for another 2-3 years, an incredible 8-9 years from start to finish.  In today’s agile software world this doesn’t work.  Technological innovation can’t wait for someone to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ of a formal specification.  There are features the world wants now and browsers are capable of delivering, why hold off?  Let’s forge ahead and deploy away!

As a savvy slashdot reader said:

“Those who ship code win.” You can sit there and tell everyone to ‘hold on’ all you want but if you don’t give them a good reason to stop pushing forward with the implementation, they aren’t going to wait for your consortium to debate for another five years. We’re moving forward. There will be bumps. The time for discussing a completely perfect approach has passed and browsers will thrust what support they can into practice, warts and all. At some point this has to be done, it will never be truly perfect.