"Microsoft, Apple, and Google will never agree on a set of standard C libraries that could be used to build rich, modern graphical applications."
this is probably very true, but it isn't even a real problem. the standard library can be expanded to encompass rendering, audio, networking and co. regardless as to platform nitty gritties we can implement a layer over the top (lots of people do this to make games already).
when i look at the web as an approach to being platform independent i see something which is truly quite poorly constructed. the kinds of bugs and problems in the webstack are utterly alien in my world... libraries to work around browser bugs? laying out objects on a screen 'complicated'? its just shoddy all over... especially the browser implementations and the myriad frameworks piled on top of javascript and CSS.
coupled with the staggering loss of performance and increase in complexity I have no desire to use web tech to develop my cross platform products - and my native development moves at an extremely rapid pace.
i qualify this very heavily with "i know how to do this and have done it alone and in teams many times more often than once"
a great example of this is everything already in the C standard library which - whilst it seems simple today now its done - hides a great deal of OS and platform specific details which vendors still disagree on but programmers in that environment are largely (and rightly) unaware of. a quick look into the Win32 apis, X11, BSD socket implementations or the Cocoa/Objective-C stack on OSX will show up just how different the platforms can be in their 'low level' interface for many things.
"Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big."
I think any document and application layout system that handles all the use cases of CSS is going to be about as complex as CSS. Certainly PDF and Microsoft Word .DOC are up there in terms of complexity.
this is probably very true, but it isn't even a real problem. the standard library can be expanded to encompass rendering, audio, networking and co. regardless as to platform nitty gritties we can implement a layer over the top (lots of people do this to make games already).
when i look at the web as an approach to being platform independent i see something which is truly quite poorly constructed. the kinds of bugs and problems in the webstack are utterly alien in my world... libraries to work around browser bugs? laying out objects on a screen 'complicated'? its just shoddy all over... especially the browser implementations and the myriad frameworks piled on top of javascript and CSS.
coupled with the staggering loss of performance and increase in complexity I have no desire to use web tech to develop my cross platform products - and my native development moves at an extremely rapid pace.
i qualify this very heavily with "i know how to do this and have done it alone and in teams many times more often than once"
a great example of this is everything already in the C standard library which - whilst it seems simple today now its done - hides a great deal of OS and platform specific details which vendors still disagree on but programmers in that environment are largely (and rightly) unaware of. a quick look into the Win32 apis, X11, BSD socket implementations or the Cocoa/Objective-C stack on OSX will show up just how different the platforms can be in their 'low level' interface for many things.