It's odd for me to see so many HTML5 champions as of late. I haven't met too many actual developers that are all excited about it. For the most part it seems to be the artistic apple champions at work and the non developers that are all about it. The art people the same guys that whine and cry when we have to use Arial instead of whatever fruity font they put in their photoshop file.(I wonder if they realize to do HTML5 at present they will need to use Arial) So sometimes I wonder if any of these HTML5 champions are really educated / experienced web developers or just people who are jumping onto the ever present apple bandwagon.
Perhaps it's just me but developing in HTML, CSS, and javascript are the most painful parts of my job. You have to rewrite styles and code to accommodate all of the browser which all run and display them differently. Constant shifting and spacing issues are everywhere and don't get me started on the file encoding annoyance. On top of that it seems you have to support the last 10 years of browser versions (hello IE6, die please). This was one of the main drivers between the rise of flash. Maybe nobody remembers the days of javascript crashing your browsers but I do. I'm not sure why people are thinking javascript is suddenly a godsend, it really is quite bad and does not work the same in all browsers.
Add to that that the performance of HTML5 animations are no better then flash animations (and actually worse if you have someone who writes clean as3 vs clean HTML5 AJAX) I don't see why there are so many champions of it currently. Maybe html5 will get an IDE and a performance boost, but until then I don't really care for the extended timelines and overtime supporting multiple browsers will bring. Not to mention most jquery stuff is kind of clunky in comparison to what flash and silverlight offer.
Am I alone in hoping that this HTML5 push dies as fast as it started? or something else comes a long and offers a better solution. (Java clean up your act now and get moving)
Do people actually believe HTML 5 will be a standard? Honestly HTML4 is barely a standard.
Do people believe ads that are coded by junior and bad developers will disappear with flash? They won't and they will be 10x harder to block and more intrusive if they are html.(the more intrusive ones now are done with a combination of flash for animations and ajax for the in the middle of your screen annoyance)
Don't even get me started on databases accessed with client side scripting that is all sorts of wrong.
Unless they actually make a real programming language for HTML5 I have no intention of sticking around and working in it if it takes over. Thankfully I've also got a little gem called stackless Python in my arsenal so maybe my best bet is to leave all this none sense behind and retreat to being a back end guy. Leave the pretty making and the browser headaches to someone else. Anyone need someone for some grid computing magic? ;P
~Cubed
