[OT] Re: Short forum post on REST API

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Daniel Gibson" <metalcaedes at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:in889j$knb$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Am 03.04.2011 00:22, schrieb Adam D. Ruppe:
>> Nick Sabalausky:
>>> Heh, yup. Because after all, VRML just went over sooo well.
>>
>> Yeah... "what's old is new again" fits so well to web 2.0.
>>
>> WebGL gets more minus points too since its on shaky technical
>> grounds too. It isn't very 'webby' if you will and may have
>> security implications... but wheee you can make shitty ports
>> of old games to the browser!
>
> If it helps killing Flash I'm fine with WebGL,

My immeditate reaction is to agree with you on that, because direct 
experience as both a flash-user and as a flash-developer has given me a 
strong personal hatred towards Flash. But, if WebGL is driven by in-browser 
JS (as I *think* it is, not that I've studied it closely), then I dunno, 
suddenly Flash doesn't sound quite so bad anymore. Heck, at the very least, 
Flash is already in byte-code when it's distributed, and the 
"JS-as-the-web's-asm" idea just gives me a rash. Plus it's cleaner/easier to 
block flash than to block specific JS features. Etc.

> [If it helps killing Flash I'm fine with] HTML5-videotag

I dunno. The thing that still bugs me about that is we *already* had the 
object tag, but then ever since YouTube came along everyone just stopped 
using it, Google outright left it out of Chrome, etc. It was just plain 
killed off in favor of flash. And now, ages later, they reinvent the object 
tag and try to convince me it'll finally pull web-A/V out of the flash 
shackes that *they* had placed web-A/V into in the first place? Even if I 
did feel that I could trust that claim (a shaky prospect), the fact remains 
that we *already* had a solution.

> (I hope google's WebM will win) etc.

Oh god yes. I suppose everyone knows I'm, well, not exactly a big Google 
fan, but the legal ball-and-chain that's welded to H.2[0-9][0-9] (whatever 
the hell it's called) just leaves it a complete non-option, IMO. I'd sooner 
use flv and an embedded player - and I've always hated the whole concept of 
flash video players.

> However that shouldn't be used in serious (non
> demo/showcase) websites until proper support is ready in all major 
> browsers.
>
> As a web developer you should be glad that IE5/6's days are over and 
> browsers
> are a more standard-conformant - or did you like writing a different 
> version  of
> your websites for each browser?
> A friend of mine who does web programming complained about having to work 
> around
> IE6's anomalies a lot until he could finally stop supporting it, so I'm 
> kind of
> surprised that you and Nick seem to like these old versions of the IE.
>

I don't really mean to say that I like the old IEs. It's just that:

1. They weren't nearly as bad as the Google/W3C fan brigade would have 
everyone believe.

2. They did a number of things that put the W3C-sanctioned equivalents to 
shame. (Things that are rarely acknoledged).

3. The "standards" are only now just starting to catch up in features, which 
kinda pulls the wind out of HTML5's sails. HTML5 isn't bad, it's just that 
it takes credit for things that it, 1. Stole from IE, and then 2. Changed in 
a non-backwards-comptible way (much like MS is often demonized for doing.)