Mythbusting for novices

One of the Mozilla guys had a go at mythbusting for HTML5.

Hint: Don't start busting your first myth by agreeing that it is true!

And worse, then proceed to try to make excuses!

And worse again, claiming that it isn't their fault!

I made a couple of long comments on the blog and from one he accused me of 'standing in the way' of the project. I would think that trying to pretend that there aren't technical problems that need to be overcome is more likely to hinder a project than comments from the peanut gallery.

The adversarial attitude was a bit of a surprise actually - from a guy who is paid to be liked and to make people like his employer. He just made me want to troll!

It's not a political problem, it's a technical one

Unfortunately I didn't notice the 'evangalist' tag: the guy's just a talker. But no amount of talking will fix the technical problems in making a browser a viable application platform.

But I think given how much money and time has been poured into it already, one might reasonably come to the conclusion that the whole task is simply an engineering feat beyond the technology being used.

For example, although you could conceivably take an every day sedan and turn it into a usable armoured vehicle: this is just not "the way you do it" - at least, if you want to do it in a technically competent and cost effective manner.

This is how I see HTML5. Although you can do all sorts of amazing and tricky stuff with it, it's not the way you would choose to do it if you had a free choice in the matter and a wide experience of the options available.

Stick to your strengths (or, "The world is not enough?")

The delivery of information and entertainment through the world wide web was a revolution which has impacted all of our lives.

Should they not be satisfied with that?

This "holy grail" of a web delivery of desktop-style applications through a platform delivered by multiple vendors is an expensive experiment which looks set to continue.