Most Apple consumers are just regular folk who are just happy to be able to use technology without knowing how to actually use technology.  Apple is ahead of everyone in user experience and ease of use, hands down.  The dumbest person I know can pick up an iOS device and do something with it.  I am talking about dumb-as-a-rock, knuckle-dragging, ate-paint-as-a-kid, dropped-on-their-head dumb people… who can pick up an iOS device and just use it.   There is no floor as to how dumb you can be and still use an iOS device… It’s amazing!

This is not a knock on the device or Apple’s approach, I happen to think it is fantastic and changed mobile device development rapidly for the better (their skinning of Unix only moderately on laptops and desktops), but what it also did was lower the bar for anyone who can apparently consider themselves “technical.”  This new breed of “technical” people, can be found buying gadgets by the droves, texting, tweeting, media sharing, social networking, and computing, apparently also having a stranglehold on the blogosphere, and the majority of media outlets, because the perception of HTML5 as the savior of the web and our gadgets is now in full force.

According to indeed.com, the trend of the word “HTML5″ in job postings has risen over 250,000% since approximately April 2010 when Steve Jobs wrote his now infamous “Thoughts on Flash” and I have to at least stop in the middle of this rant to laugh… all this talk on open standards prompts me to want a new open standard for defining who is even allowed to speak, write, blog, or otherwise even mention technology.  People with no technical skill whatsoever are attempting to drive what technology should be used on my wonderful gadgets and computers (languages, platforms, OSs) and it needs to come to a halt.  There should be a license or something that must be acquired to speak on such topics… if I started a blog giving medical advice, I’d be thrown in jail, so given the not so dire consequences of poor technical blogs, there is at least grounds for community service and a gag order.

So what’s so magical about HTML5?  HTML5  has added barely a handful of tags on top of the HTML4 specification… but the most important features at the center of the hype are the Video and Canvas tags… two. new. tags. It only took them 15 years to create these, and still no two browsers can render the old ones the same.  The majority of the rest of the hype really lies in CSS3 which is it’s own completely separate specification and its own set of standards.   The primary scripting language (JavaScript) for marrying these two technologies together REMAINS UNCHANGED.  In fact, according to Wikipedia, there has been a big battle for the last 5 years between two camps, on whether JavaScript should evolve or not according to the ECMAScript standards.  It’s these types of battles with the constituents not working on behalf of users, but merely to capture more of the market within their own interests that make HTML and the open web a nightmare for developers who are creating the content.  And a farce that these standards are being driven by concerned constituents working on behalf of developers and users expecting brilliant and timely content.

The “new JavaScript” (ECMAScript Harmony, formerly ECMAScript 4) was planned for the following upgrades as early as 2007:

• Classes
• A module system
• Optional type annotations and static typing, probably using a structural type system
• Generators and iterators
• Destructuring assignment
• Algebraic data types

Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft among others are actively lobbying against this progression, stating that an incompatible upgrade to the scripting standards would effectively “break the web” as we know it.  When the single application platform commonly known as “The Browser” becomes too powerful, then Microsoft and larger traditional software manufacturers certainly stand to lose something, but I can only surmise that Google and Yahoo fear either a significant infrastructure cost to upgrade their services or some other sinister money making pool that I cannot imagine.  Whatever it is, it revolves around money.  Even Microsoft with their MetroUI landing in Windows 8 is now plugin free and “HTML5 only.”  What they don’t tell you is that you will also have to use HTML5 tags that will only be compatible with Microsoft IE based renderers to make it work there.  Apple does the same thing on their HTML5 showcase, only using webkit versions of standards based tags that have yet to be solidified in the HTML5 standard… which won’t be “final” until 2022, so don’t hold your breath, even if Apple tells you to.

Be that as it may, I am a scientist, and as a developer, I had to dive back in to the magical world of HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 that Steve Jobs described, because last I checked, HTML4, JavaScript, and CSS were a pathetic nightmare of browser inconsistencies, massive text downloads from the crap-ton of AJAX/JavaScript/CSS files required to make simple things happen.  It does keep many people gainfully employed though, so in these times it is hard to argue for efficiency in employment and labor.

I chose to start my exploration at www.chromeexperiments.com which mostly explores Canvas, since this is the “Flash Killer” that Steve Jobs was emphatically steering us towards.  Low and behold, most of the stuff there doesn’t work in any of my latest browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, IE).  After an hour or so finding settings to tweak my browser to even display this wonderful content, I am greeted with simple visualizations that Flash has been doing for a decade, only now this visualization is using 200 to 600 megabytes of RAM and 50% to 80% of my CPU.  This on a state of the art QuadCore CPU, Nvidia 570GTX (new as of July 2011), with 8GB of RAM.  My father would have made a fortune with this kind of computing power using better old school programming practices.  All to get rid of a plugin that I can choose to download or not.  Even when plugin technology was obnoxious to deal with (jumping around to websites to get Flash, Real Player, Java for Applets, Quicktime, Google Earth Plugin, and a few others) content made it worth the trip in most cases, and of those plugin technologies, Flash content seems to be the most compelling based on its success.  Why would anyone have even installed it, if what they wanted to view wasn’t compelling enough to get thru the hoops?  Flash would have died years ago, but games, video, and applications kept people going to the plugin page.  Speaking of which, no mention of the useless Quicktime plugin by Apple… though if you visit the HTML5 showcase on a Windows machine, it prompts you to install the Quicktime Plugin.  What a joke.

So now the real joke is on me as a developer of rich content, since  I will likely get the opportunity to devolve to a lower and less powerful programming language to stay “current” and the hope of things conforming to OOP practices will be lost in a sea of browser incompatibilities, massive amounts of non-standard text file collections (without classes and packages, JavaScript and CSS is pretty much a clusterfunk), and horrible programming practices.  And the even bigger joke is on users who for the next 3-5 years can sit around and wait or use current and superior plugin technology (which ultimately will likely stick around), and waste the web as a giant text document with pictures, or suffer through painfully inefficient entertainment and rich experiences where they can finally experience resource hogging unilaterally on all of their new devices at tremendous new levels without ever installing a plugin.  And the final joke is on the people of the IT world, who will, without any thanks or gratitude, support this giant pile of “beta testing” as large companies and groups of mega-corporations jockey for something that gives them the lions share of monopolizing our use of the web.

~jookyone