Browsers are changing to accommodate powerful applications.

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Tuesday, March 10, 2009
An Upgrade for the Web
Browsers are changing to accommodate powerful applications.
By Erica Naone
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Credit: Technology Review
We've come a long way from the flat documents that made up the Web in its early years. As Internet access has expanded and bandwidth has increased, designers and programmers have figured out ways to build sophisticated, interactive applications that run through the browser. Nowadays, these include Web-based word processors, photo-editing software, money-management tools, and much more.
The next generation of HTML, the markup language that is used to build most Web content, promises to make Web applications work even better. Some proposed features of this new standard--HTML 5--are already being built into several popular browsers, offering a glimpse of an application-enabled Web.
As things stand, Web applications are hampered by the code used to build them because they were never designed to make fullfledged desktop-style programs run. For example, most browsers can only run one piece of JavaScript code--a scripting language that can run on top of HTML--at any one time, and this limits the functionality of a Web application. To make matters worse, different browsers react differently to existing Web standards, leaving developers to struggle to make sure that their application is compatible with different browsers.
"We started to see a migration to doing more and more stuff on the Web," says Christopher Blizzard, open-source evangelist for the Mozilla Foundation, which maintains the Firefox browser. Blizzard says that most browsers simply cannot access data stored offline, or perform complex graphical capabilities without the use of a plug-in such as Flash or Java. "We're trying to find ways for people to be able to take the live, programmable documents that make up the Web and start integrating them with all these other pieces outside the scope of the browser."
But guided by HTML 5, browsers are finally being reengineered to address many of these problems. Michael Smith, a member of the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML working group, says that the most important part of the effort has been creating specifications to ensure that different browsers perform more tasks in the same way.
To help browsers handle intensive Web applications, HTML 5 includes a feature called worker threads. These allow a browser to deal with heavier computation by running JavaScript in the background, while a user goes on interacting with the application as usual. This part of HTML 5 will be supported in the next release of Firefox, and a similar technology is already part of the Google Chrome browser. Brian Rakowski, director of product management for Chrome, says that Google's browser will move toward the technology described in HTML 5.
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There's a reason for thatdtutelman on 03/10/2009 at 8:03 AM
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The article says, "The new standard also focuses on making Web applications work offline. Google Gears and Adobe AIR already allow a Web-based application to access local storage and processing on a user's computer, but HTML 5 aims to make offline capability even easier for a browser to use, without requiring additional plug-ins."That worries me. A lot.There are reasons that Javascript was more secure than Microsoft's original scripting objects. (Probably still so -- I'm retired now and haven't kept up with everything.) One of the key reasons was that Javascript did not allow access to local storage. If you give an opportunity for code that just downloaded itself to read or write local storage indiscriminately, you lay your computer wide open for all sorts of nasty stuff.And narrowing "indiscriminately" down is very tricky. It is not for the average user, and probably not even for most computer professionals, to control the access policy for the browser on their computer. Effective administration of access policy requires understanding the hacker's mind and methods. And, since those methods change daily, the policy must evolve very quickly to keep up. (Think about the daily updates to your anti-virus software.)Given that criminal, political, and terrorist elements are getting ever more sophisticated, we need to be VERY careful how much we open up access to the local machine, especially the disk. It's a real Pandora's box. Perhaps the designers of HTML 5 have a handle on it. But I'm skeptical.DaveT
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HTML X...give it a restkstauff on 03/10/2009 at 11:29 AM
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Why does this industry continue its vain attempts to graft the ability to execute code in a browser? Javascript is a terrible language - it has little object orientation and zero type safety. This article explains how the 5th generation of HTML is being implemented in five different browsers. That's the problem - none of the five will digest this frankensteinian dinosaur HTML stream the same way.The article correctly highlights the fact that bandwidth has increased dramatically over the last ten years. Why bother with the absolute mess that is HTML/Javascript when you can simply download an executable that can run safely in a Java or .NET sandbox on the user's machine? Developers can then use first class languages like Java or C# to write first class applications.What about deployment you ask? That's been solved for years. There are plenty of technologies for centralized deployment of client applications from a server. MS's One Click comes to mind immediately, and game companies have been doing it a lot longer. If the industry would spend more time ensuring that applications could be easily served over the internet, then developers could get on with creating more powerful apps for our ever increasingly sophisticated devices. And finally the days of HTML Hell would be a thing of the past.Oh, and those guys like the one from Mozilla would have to learn Java or C# instead of HTML/Javascript...sorry dude.
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