Is HTML Dead? | Ryan Stewart – Mountaineer Coding

There was an interesting post I caught over at Adblock Plus which talked about a session at the Mozilla Developer Day at pit XUL against HTML. There has been a lot of talk, mostly from the HTML crowd, that they are worried about some of the Rich Internet Application markups (XUL/XAML/MXML) taking over the web and relegating HTML to some dark, antiquated, technology graveyard. What made it interesting was that this conversation occurred at a Mozilla developers conference and Mozilla is a very strong supporter of HTML. As a result, the tone of the conversation was in getting people to switch from XUL to HTML.

Are you puzzled? I think many people were. Was that a serious question? The advantages of XUL are too obvious: the box model, powerful localization mechanism and user interface widgets with native look-and-feel. But it isnâ€™t that simple. The box model can be used from HTML as well, just take a look at Mozillaâ€™s CSS extensions (e.g. display: -moz-box and -moz-flex: 1).

Wladimir goes on to talk about reasons XUL isn’t going away and highlights the things that it cannot do as being important:

It cannot do table-based layouts or relative positioning (everybody who ever â€œinheritedâ€ a web application will probably appreciate this a lot). It doesnâ€™t do all the numerous quirks to be compatible with all browsers including Mosaic 1.0. It doesnâ€™t even have a quirks mode! It is a simple and straightforward language built for one and only one reason: to enable efficient development of user interfaces.

He’s talking about XUL, but the same could be said for any of the RIA markup languages. With these languages we get a chance to start from scratch and focus on a different set of problems. HTML isn’t going to go away, and I don’t think anyone wants it to. But as the web evolves, not all of the solutions can be implemented with HTML. The advanced user interfaces we’re starting to see are an important part of the web and the way we build them is very different from the way we build web pages. We should continue to strive and make them as “webby” as possible, but that doesn’t mean we have to build all of our apps with HTML and CSS.

[tags]HTML, XUL, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

Woody

Some people feel differently:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/487-what-if-i-actually-like-html-css-and-javascript

Ryan … loved to hear your thoughts on that post.
http://www.riapedia.com Mike Potter

Title: Is HTML dead?
Body: … “HTML isnâ€™t going to go away”…

I guess that answers that question?

HTML isn’t dead, and it shouldn’t be. As you blogged about a long time ago, people shouldn’t be using RIA technologies to create web sites. They’re for web applications, and there’s a major difference. HTML is great for displaying and linking articles and information. Its not great when you’re building an application, though hacks like Ajax make it possible.

Hopefully we’ll all start using these technologies where they should be: Flex / XUL / Whatever for applications, and HTML for web pages. There’s nothing wrong with that, the right tool for the job should be what’s important.

Mike
http://disambiguo.us Doug Strickland

I think that more should be said about good design patterns for each. I’ve designed projects where the client insists on an application framework like Flex without really understanding the reasons behind it. For whatever reason (usually competitive or strategic-fundraising) they will say things like “We need our new contact us help center written in Flex.” Entirely static content that won’t change in any near time. In other cases it’s been difficult to convince a client that they will have a quicker prototype with something like Flex, but they’re stuck in html/AJAX land, and throwing RIA into the Flash bin…
http://www.zeuslabs.us/ Josh

Maybe, just maybe, HTML and XUL can live together in harmony. XUL is designed to build application interfaces. HTML is designed to build documents. Here’s the kicker: if you use each for it’s intended purpose, you’ll have a nice, more semantic web, and HTML can finally stop being hacked to build complex applications that were never part of its design.

Zounds!
http://adblockplus.org/ Wladimir Palant

I think you are citing me out of context. We weren’t talking about the web – HTML is the language of the web and nobody seriously doubts that (at least if you take the people who were in that room). We were talking about user interfaces – for applications that you download, like Firefox, Songbird or Joost.
http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

Hey Wladimir, I didn’t mean to take you out of context, I just thought it was an interesting conversation. I’m talking about the same kind of apps that you are. But I’m also talking about those kind of applications delivered inside the browser. I’ve seen XUL apps built for browser consumption and most of the Flex apps right now are as well. So when you want desktop-like interfaces, I think we agree that HTML doesn’t cut it. But if those interfaces are meant to be delivered in the browser, is it bad that we aren’t using HTML?
http://adblockplus.org/ Wladimir Palant

That’s why HTML is going to be extended more advanced native-looking widgets, and that’s a good thing. But it is still the web, I doubt that it will ever be able to replace the “real” applications. And for those you are free to choose whatever tool suits you best – and XUL is still much better than HTML.
joe

What can flex and flash do that you can’t do with html and some javascript these days? Sure flash won’t be such a huge success because of the learning curve I think, it’s much faster to do things in javascript than in flash and actionscript, and a lot easier to connect to your database too!