Although I'm not involved with enterprise software, I am worried by the direction Firefox and Chrome are taking: in addition to being a platform for deploying applications, the web is the most important way for readers and writers to share text on the internet, and I worry that rapidly improving the web's ability to deploy applications will make it less suitable for reading and writing. For example, if the web would have been used only for reading and writing, browsers would probably be a lot more stable than they actually are (since an application-delivery platform is a more complicated and consequently less stable thing than a text-delivery platform). And browsers probably wouldn't require half a gig of RAM like Firefox 5 does.
Note that it is not worth a writer's time to use an alternative to the web to deliver text over the net until a sufficiently large fraction of his potential audience is set up to use the alternative. Similarly, a reader cannot use the alternative to download or read a particular text unless a writer (well, owner of the text's copyright, to be more exact) chooses to publish in that alternative. And the existence of the web makes it hard for any such alternative to gain traction. So, readers and writers are stuck with the web for a number of years, until some alternative reaches critical mass.
So when I read about how the pursuit of the HTML 5 vision is causing pain for enterprise users, my first reaction is not to conclude that enterprise users are holding back the web, but rather to see the enterprise as a potential ally in the important project of preventing the HTML 5 program or the enhanced-web-app program from making reading and writing online a lot more difficult than it needs to be.
I don't see how the web is getting worse at sharing text. If anything, HTML5 makes it possible to mark up text in a more semantic way, improving access for screen readers for the blind, for example.
The fact that people CAN embed movies and audio does not prevent them from posting text. Nor are increasing RAM requirements a problem if you consider the market. I just checked Dell's site, and you can't even buy a laptop with less than 1GB of RAM right now, but you can get more than 16GB.
>I don't see how the web is getting worse at sharing text.
I already gave some reasons, and here is one more: if the web had stayed a means of sharing text and images, it would not be one of the most popular ways for attackers to get control of a desktop computer.
As a counterpoint, the next version of Firefox has support for automatic hyphenation, at least if the author asks for it. It could ship in August of this year (as currently planned), or it could ship a year and a half from now (the old schedule). Which do you prefer? Which do enterprises prefer?
>I worry that rapidly improving the web's ability to deploy applications will make it less suitable for reading and writing.
Will make it? It already has. The web as we know it is a fucking unfettered mess. We've just been jamming applications into a document format so hard for so long we're used to it. You are right though, its going to get a lot worse.
We need a new platform. We're probably not going to get one, the "web" is just going to expand to engulf every bit of functionality a new platform would have, but bring along over two decades worth of evolutionary cruft. I've resolved to just stay out of the way, not fight the inevitable.
Note that it is not worth a writer's time to use an alternative to the web to deliver text over the net until a sufficiently large fraction of his potential audience is set up to use the alternative. Similarly, a reader cannot use the alternative to download or read a particular text unless a writer (well, owner of the text's copyright, to be more exact) chooses to publish in that alternative. And the existence of the web makes it hard for any such alternative to gain traction. So, readers and writers are stuck with the web for a number of years, until some alternative reaches critical mass.
So when I read about how the pursuit of the HTML 5 vision is causing pain for enterprise users, my first reaction is not to conclude that enterprise users are holding back the web, but rather to see the enterprise as a potential ally in the important project of preventing the HTML 5 program or the enhanced-web-app program from making reading and writing online a lot more difficult than it needs to be.