Thoughts, Code, Other

News from the Internet Explorer team - latest builds of IE8 are passing the ACID 2 test. See General Manager Dean Hachamovitch's post about this important milestone for IE8.

Developers everywhere love these kinds of announcements - interoperability makes everyone’s lives (even those of users!) better. The browser wars are definitely back on, just when we all thought the web was dead, or had at least hit its innovation peaked.

I was entering angle brackets, tags, and javascript code into text editors more than 10 years ago in order to create web sites. Today we call them “web applications” – the lexical adjustment necessary to reflect how their capabilities have moved on. The server side has changed immeasurably to make this happen (remember CGI anyone?).

But from a presentation layer perspective, things aren’t all that different today- HTML and Javascript themselves are essentially the same as they were back then.

Sure, today we can drag and drop controls onto a design surface and get great template support for those server controls, but there’s a backlash of sorts to that. Check out the MVC framework for a model that (amongst other things) allows the developer to stick to old school HTML coding, while retaining the modern facilities that ASP.Net brings.

So, much to my surprise, I find myself writing HTML and Javascript today more than ever. Yet the experience is entirely different, mostly because of improvements in tools.

The difference between Visual Studio 2008 and notepad is obvious of course, but I would argue that the biggest impact on the experience of coding web UIs has been improvements in coding libraries. Sites bristling with swish interactivity and great functionality have become infinitely easier with the arrival of libraries like prototype, mootools, ASP.Net Ajax, and my personal favourite jQuery.

If you’ve never tried jQuery, make sure you do – you’ll never go back, and wonder how you managed without it. Productivity soars and your creativity is let loose, simply by making things easier. They do this by simplifying things like animation and so on, but critically they do this by normalizing the differences between browsers. They standardize the event object, allow cross browser event attaching in a consistent manner, and present a browser agnostic interface to UI elements.

Suddenly the arduous task of supporting multiple browsers is almost ameliorated -just at the time when browsers are becoming standards compliant! Of course the happy day when everyone uses a perfectly standards-compliant browser is years off (if ever) so we’ll still need such libraries until then. But the further irony is that I know of no reason why these libraries could not have been developed years ago. I can only imagine how many hairs I would still possess if I hadn’t pulled them out over some arcane difference between IE x.5 and IE y.1 and Netscape z.0!

HTML continues to hold its own, and with continued improvements in the ecosystem like ACID compliance, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t continue to do so. The semantic web is the Next Big Thing, and concepts like GRDDL and microformats will serve to underpin (X)HTML’s existence for the foreseeable future, even with the emergence of amazingly capable platforms like Silverlight.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.