Letters: Readers Sound Off About HTML5 -- Visual Studio Magazine

Letters: Readers Sound Off About HTML5

Robby Ingebretsen's July VSInsider column on HTML5 produced plenty of opinions.

By Readers of Visual Studio Magazine
08/01/2011

Robby Ingebretsen's July VSInsider column on HTML5 produced plenty of opinions:

To be honest, I wouldn't say HTML5 is going to replace things like an app made in C++, but it's definitely not the hype that was Java. HTML5 -- or, more specifically, Web apps -- is real and is not going away. More and better app processing is happening on the client, even data stores.

Name Withheld

Microsoft did not get to where it is today by developing open source (or TML/JavaScript) development platforms. It also did not get where it is by cowering to the open source (or HTML/JavaScript) crowd. Silverlight is a reliable and elegant platform. This is what the company should be pushing.

John

The reason why Microsoft platform developers are overwhelmingly rejecting all the hype about HTML/JavaScript as a replacement for a "real" development environment (like we already have in the XAML/CLR languages/.NET technology stack) is because the HTML/JavaScript stack is so fundamentally lacking in the basic things we've come to depend on to create "real" applications. A partial list of big ones includes: state, object orientation, tooling, strong data typing, data binding, compilation, LINQ, the Entity Framework, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation and (at least up until recently) support from an organization (Microsoft) committed to advancing the platform's technology with a consistent level of quality and dependability while supporting its developers with a firehose of different media, online resources and events.

A complex application's UI is like the tip of an iceberg: There's much more below the surface than above. The typical HTML application is more like a sailboat: What's above the waterline may be pretty, but there's not much underneath. I wish the bigwigs at Microsoft pushing this travesty and the ignorant media types mindlessly parroting them would spend a little time understanding this.

Bryan Morris

Peter Vogel, VSM tools editor, offers a response:
Here's a question: Do you want to deliver your functionality to someone who's running on a non-Windows platform? If the answer is "No," then the .NET technologies are an excellent choice. If the answer is "Yes" (which means 95 percent of the smartphones out there), then the technologies you need are HTML and JavaScript. This assumes, of course, that you get to pick your arena: Your customers, clients or employer may disagree with your choice.

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