The State Of Web Development Ripped Apart In 25 Tweets By One Man

There are few people who knows the ins and outs of the web as well as Joe Hewitt 0pt ! important; max-height: 2000px; max-width: 2000px; min-width: 0px;
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no-repeat; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: top; display: inline;” src=”http://i.ixnp.com/images/v6.28/t.gif”>. For the past decade,
he’s had his hands deep in everything from Netscape, to AOL, to Firefox,
to Facebook (where he currently works). Hewitt also knows a thing or
two about the iPhone. He’s the one who first built Facebook’s excellent
iPhone web app (before there were native apps on the iPhone), and then
the native app — which is one of the best
apps on the platform. So when he rants about something (as he does
from time-to-time),
people listen. And today he went on one such rant.

Following Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ post min-height: 0px; padding: 1px 0pt 0pt; border: 0pt none; font-style:
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no-repeat; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: top; display: inline;” src=”http://i.ixnp.com/images/v6.28/t.gif”> about Flash this
morning, Hewitt went on Twitter 0pt ! important; max-height: 2000px; max-width: 2000px; min-width: 0px;
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no-repeat; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: top; display: inline;” src=”http://i.ixnp.com/images/v6.28/t.gif”> and started going off
with some of this thoughts. I asked Hewitt if I could recap them; his
response, “sure, why not.” Hewitt, some may recall, quit
iPhone development over his distaste for some App Store policies.
Today, seeing a wave of anti-Flash talk on Twitter spurred by Jobs’
post, Hewitt started
out min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding: 1px 0pt 0pt; border: 0pt none;
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no-repeat; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: top; display: inline;” src=”http://i.ixnp.com/images/v6.28/t.gif”>:

Redirect your hatred of Flash to the W3C, whose embarrassingly slow pace forced devs to use a plugin because the
standards were so weak.

Also, I am looking at you, developers who bitch whenever a browser offers “non-standard” but .innovative APIs.

Browser makers need to go nuts with non-standard APIs and let the W3C standardize later. Waiting for the committee to innovate is suicide.

So basically, Hewitt’s take is that Flash (and all plug-ins) only exists because the W3C 0pt ! important; max-height: 2000px; max-width: 2000px; min-width: 0px;
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left: auto; top: auto; line-height: normal; background-image:
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no-repeat; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: top; display: inline;” src=”http://i.ixnp.com/images/v6.28/t.gif”> (the governing body for
web standards) is too slow to formalize and approve innovative new
technologies. He urges browser-makers to break away from the W3C
constraints and start going crazy with new APIs.

He then comes in defense of Microsoft, the company that once all-but destroyed (through what just about everyone including the U.S.
government thinks were unsavory means) the company Hewitt started his
career at (Netscape).

10 years ago we bullied Microsoft into stopping innovation on IE so the W3C could take over. How’d that work out?

For those too young to remember, IE was innovating like crazy from 4.0 -6.0, right up until the DOJ and web standards commies intervened.

@jeff_lamarche Oh c’mon. Aside from ActiveX, Microsoft moved the web forward faster from 96-00 than any other browser maker has.

I don’t know why MS abandoned IE, but I do know that web developers were begging them to stop innovating and just follow the committee.

Hewitt’s take here is that the antitrust action against Microsoft halted innovation in Internet Explorer. In 1996, when Hewitt says IE
innovation really started, that browser didn’t even have 10% share of
the market, while Netscape had nearly 90%. As an underdog, IE had to
innovate. Until, of course, they took over the web, and then Microsoft
inexplicably all-but abandoned the product.

Hewitt then turns to the rise of the app stores (including, yes, the App Store).

Why are app stores threatening the web and luring developers like me away from it? “Evil” proprietary tech is blowing the
web away.

I want desperately to be a web developer again, but if I have to wait until 2020 for browsers to do what Cocoa can do in 2010, I won’t wait.

The “‘Evil’ proprietary tech is blowing the web away” quote is pretty compelling (I’m still kicking myself for not using it in the headline).
Again, Hewitt’s point here is that the web is nowhere near where
non-web technologies like Cocoa are — and won’t be for a decade.

@KuraFire Did Microsoft patent their non-standard html/javascript/css extensions, preventing other browsers from
implementing them?

@johnfoliot True, they [w3c] don’t dictate, but developers shame others who use non-standard APIs. That’s the problem.

He wonders here why some of Microsoft’s standards weren’t adopted by the W3C? Then blames the web developers for shaming other developers who
use tech not sanctioned by the governing body.

I am ranting because I want to drop Cocoa and go back to the web, but I am upset about how much power I have to give up to do
that.

How it should go: browsers innovate differently, users pick the best one, later W3C standardizes what users chose, losing browsers conform.

The core of Hewitt’s argument. Web technologies aren’t moving fast enough, and why should he have to use a less powerful language to
conform to web standards? Again, he hopes that browsers will start to
innovate and force the W3C to conform to them.

@joseph_wanja I love what Cocoa can do, I just don’t like C-based languages for UI programming.

The reason why Hewitt doesn’t just stick with Cocoa if he finds it superior to web-based languages.

@eston Users might be aware of their choices if more developers wrote browser-specific sites. Developers really pick the
winner.

An urging for developers to take action to reverse the trend.

@JamesWatch IE6 was fucking amazing in 2000. It’s not fair to compare it to modern browsers.

A word of caution for those who bash IE6 — remember what it was like when it came out.

@joseph_wanja unfortunately I would recommend Cocoa [rather than web languages] at this point. Wish I didn’t have to say
that.

Cocoa, while not perfect, is better than web languages.

@michaelvillar So launch a different browser. Not a big deal. Know what is a big deal? Having to buy a different phone for each
app store.

An interesting point. Hewitt is saying that while it may seem like a hassle to have the web coded for different browsers, it’s much more of a
hassle to have apps coded for different phones.

@jjathman I’m not justifying ActiveX, but the html/css/javascript side of IE which at one time was state of the art.

Again, more defense of IE back in the day.

From here, Hewitt goes into a series of thoughts on web vs. native apps.

@ppk Yes, exactly. I’d rather developers had forced users to launch different browsers instead of making watered down x-browser
sites.

@ppk That’s sort of what is happening with mobile web vs. native mobile apps, except app stores don’t extend the browser, they replace
it.

@slauriat “best viewed in X” was not as bad as “buy another phone”, which is what we got for letting the web go to shit so apps could rise.

@ppk As someone who has tried to do both cutting edge native and web iPhone apps, iPhone Safari is a joke compared to iPhone Cocoa.

App stores replace the web, simply because their languages are better, in Hewitt’s mind. And it’s our own fault for letting the web go
to shit, and letting this happen. His last tweet is particularly
powerful: Hewitt does have a lot of experience on both sides, and
considers iPhone Safari to be a “joke” compared to what you can do
natively. This is a sentiment a lot of developers whisper about, but
seldom say publicly.

Finally, Hewitt qualifies some of his statements a bit.

I’ve been hard on Flash, but we should all thank Macromedia/Adobe for 10 years of picking up the slack of the W3C,
Microsoft, and Mozilla.

And really, how screwed would we be if the WebKit team weren’t so god damn competent? Ok, signing off now, thanks for listening. 🙂

Fair enough, plenty of juicy post-worthy comments for one day.