Seriously, does anybody write desktop applications any more? These were my specialty and I feel like all this modern crap has taken away my ability to earn.[/QUOTE]
Wow, someone crankier and more old-fashioned than myself… this will be fun.
Some of the technologies offer real advantages – CSS for example allows you to enhance the page and create layouts, often using less bandwidth and less HTML. In fact, it lets you take your HTML back to the original intent; saying what things are and then letting the user agent (browser) determine how best to show them… all CSS does is allow you to target certain types of user agents to further enhance their appearance.
It’s where the idea of “separation of presentation from content” comes into play – semantic markup; saying what your things ARE (headings, paragraphs, lists) instead of what they look like (font, center, align) allows you to target multiple targets off one set of HTML, and still have a decent workable page for search engines, screen readers with assistive technologies, or people who just want to turn all the fancy extra crap off.
You go to one of my sites, you turn off CSS, you get a clean, simple flat HTML page that’s fully functional. You leave CSS on and turn images off, you get a working CSS layout where all the content is still useful.
CSS also, as I mentioned, can save on bandwidth and make pages load faster; since an external CSS stylesheet is CACHED across pages. So if people visit more than one page that uses the same styling, when they go to that second page it’s already on the clients machine ready to go; it also means less markup overall since you can say something once, instead of a dozen times over and over.
You take old HTML 3.2 from the peak of “let’s piss on what HTML is for” (The following is taken from an actual site I took over running in 2003 the previous maintainer had tossed together using “HotMetal Pro” – an old WYSIWYG. My involvement ended last year after they stepped on my johnson with golf cleats connected to a car battery – that’s actually how one of the junior partners described their handling of the changeover!)
</FONT></SPAN><B><SPAN STYLE="Font-Size : 14pt"><FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica">Inner Sphere Idenity</FONT></SPAN></B><SPAN
STYLE="Font-Size : 10pt"><FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica"><BR>
<BR>
In a region called home by as many different peoples and cultures as the Inner Sphere, it may seem strange to speak
of an overall identity, or of any similarities at all. Yet every Inner Sphere nation shares three characteristics
that set them apart from the Clans: a workable balance between vastly diverse elements, families in which parents
or close blood relatives care for children of varying ages, and recognition of other human endeavors as equal or
superior to waging war.<BR>
<BR>
</FONT></SPAN><B><SPAN STYLE="Font-Size : 14pt"><FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica">Clan and Inner Sphere Differences</FONT></SPAN></B><SPAN
STYLE="Font-Size : 10pt"><FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica"><BR>
<BR>
Like many groups in the Inner Sphere, individual Clans see themselves as significantly different from their fellows.
Though minor from an Inner Sphere perspective, cultural differences among the Clans frequently threaten to explode
into major rifts. Throughout Clan history, they have prompted everything from long-standing feuds to mini-civil
wars to outright obliteration.<BR>
<BR>
The realms of the Inner Sphere are far more different from each other than are any two Clans. Some are virtually
bubbling over with different cultural groups and political factions. Others hew sharply to a single cultural pattern
and centralized power structure. Yet even the most freewheeling society possesses some sense of unified identity,
and even the least tolerant realm peacefully incorporates nonconformist elements.<BR>
<BR>
</FONT></SPAN><B><SPAN STYLE="Font-Size : 12pt"><FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica">Falcon vs. Wolf</FONT></SPAN></B><SPAN
STYLE="Font-Size : 10pt"><FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica"><BR>
Spends time declaring the same things over and over again, isn’t semantic so screen readers have no clue what’s going on, and is an all around waste of code… for what today would be a simple:
<h3>Inner Sphere Idenity</h3>
<p>
In a region called home by as many different peoples and cultures as the Inner Sphere, it may seem strange to speak of an overall identity, or of any similarities at all. Yet every Inner Sphere nation shares three characteristics that set them apart from the Clans: a workable balance between vastly diverse elements, families in which parents or close blood relatives care for children of varying ages, and recognition of other human endeavors as equal or superior to waging war.
</p>
<h3>Clan and Inner Sphere Differences</h3>
<p>
Like many groups in the Inner Sphere, individual Clans see themselves as significantly different from their fellows. Though minor from an Inner Sphere perspective, cultural differences among the Clans frequently threaten to explode into major rifts. Throughout Clan history, they have prompted everything from long-standing feuds to mini-civil wars to outright obliteration.
</p><p>
The realms of the Inner Sphere are far more different from each other than are any two Clans. Some are virtually bubbling over with different cultural groups and political factions. Others hew sharply to a single cultural pattern and centralized power structure. Yet even the most freewheeling society possesses some sense of unified identity, and even the least tolerant realm peacefully incorporates nonconformist elements.
</p>
<h3>Falcon vs. Wolf</h3>
with this as the CSS:
h3 {
font:bold 120%/120% arial,helvetica,sans-serif;
}
p {
margin:0 0 1.2em;
}
So you can see the obvious advantages there. It IS a superior way of handling things. When there’s a legitimate benefit, don’t be afraid of ‘new’ technologies.
Especially when said technologies are already over a decade old! (which is the shocking part of people still sleazing out pages in transitional; and why HTML 5 being the ‘new transitional’ is a step BACKWARDS)
Javascript is supposed to be there to further enhance and simplify use for the user; unfortunately the majority of people crapping out scripts on their sites are instead using it for goofy animations, dropdown effects, replicating things like TARGET which were deprecated for a reason, or using AJAX to recreate framesets as if that’s magically going to be somehow better.
Scripting used with restraint is a great thing – the total lack of restraint right now is taking good site concepts and flushing them down the toilet… leading the charge of course is the fat bloated idiotic jquery asshattery - that after three and a half decades of programming I can’t believe ANYONE is dumb enough to want to use. (See my opinion of HTML 5).
jQuery offers NO real world benefits over writing javascript without it; unless your idea of “benefits” is making things bigger, needlessly cryptic, and crapping all over your page with bandwidth wasting animations that do more to get in the users way than it does to help them do anything. Oh sure, you’ll hear the lame excuse that it exists to “assist in dealing with cross browser incompatibilities” – but the part of the code that ACTUALLY does that shouldn’t even need to break 5k uncompressed! 95% or more of it’s codebase is JUST stupid animated crap, ways to make forms LESS useful or trick nubes into forgetting that all user input is suspect, or in general things that exist more to stroke the designers… ego, than it is about delivering the content of the page to the user in a useful manner. This is why your people who just endlessly copypasta into existing pages quickly break the half a megabyte mark on scripting COMPRESSED… then come to places like this asking “what’s wrong with my page”, then get their panties in a twist when GOD FORBID you actually tell them!
To be frank, the majority of websites that have javascript on them right now have NO LEGITIMATE REASON to have it there in terms of delivering a useful experience to the user; from half-assed goofy slide-show crap that shoe-horns you into a fixed width layout, to stupid menu animations that burn accessibility at the stake, to AJAX/DHTML type elements that piss all over the ashes. By the time you take that level of stupidity and add jQuery to it, the best you can hope for is to get the site buried in secret so it’s grave isn’t defiled.
Which is NOT to say there aren’t useful applications of Javascript, or more specifically scripted applications. Google Maps is a great example… though that brings us to your question:
Desktop applications aren’t going anywhere, but with Windows 8 and the “metro” interface, as well as on mobile HTML and CSS will see more and more use for designing user interfaces for applications…
This actually isn’t anything new; go back to when IE5 came out and Microsoft documented and opened up the API calls to Trident (the rendering engine under IE) for use in making application interfaces… almost a decade before XULRunner was a twinkle in a FLOSS fanboy’s eye. It was actually a laugh that a number of Antivirus softwares from '97 through to the early part of the last decade actually relied upon IE to render their user interfaces! They used HTML running inside a IE instance as their UI!
HTML/CSS and even with some javascript assistance for desktop application UI design is an exciting prospect; it opens the door to more people being able to make software. At the same time, the penalties in speed, code size and functionality have to be weighed carefully; and naturally they won’t be. For every useful result, there will always be a dozen little crapplets that suck just as bad as VB crapplets of the past 20 years, hypercard stacks masquerading as applications, or the people who had the nerve to try and distribute software written in ROM Basic as business applications.
I would suggest taking the time to learn these technologies and to try out some of those devices you “don’t have or want” so you can actually be qualified to comment on them. I badmouth a lot of this new stuff, but I only do so after trying them and giving them a serious chance… A lesson I had drilled into me from an early age – If you aren’t going to take the time to review them seriously and understand them you have little business opening your yap on the subject!
Besides, they day you think there’s nothing new to learn is the day the rest of the world leaves you behind. The IT field is in constant flux, if you think you can learn to do something one way and then never have to update your skills, you’re in the wrong field.
Though I understand the feeling, I had the same reaction when Borland ditched OWL for the VCL – the latter being visual programming is something I can’t wrap my head around; but I don’t go around badmouthing Visual C++ or Delphi – BECAUSE I can’t understand how to use them and as such don’t, I’m not qualified to rip into them… It is depressing though that I can hand compile my own 6502, 6809, 1802, Z80 or x86 machine language, but I can’t understand visual programming. (Though as i’ve said for years I’d rather hand compile 8k of machine language than try and debug 50 lines of C code – it’s less cryptic)
Rejecting things you’ve tried to use on legitimate functionality grounds is different from rejecting them just because they are new, different, outside your realm of understanding or supplanting your existing skillset. One is making a rational choice, the other is being a whiny little …
P.S. Mailing lists? REALLY? I hated them back on Fidonet as being impossible to follow and useless… Compared to a modern forums, even the steaming pile of manure known as vBull is just… wow. What’s next? Usenet and IRC? These technologies are dead for a reason.
– edit – though e-mail is a great example of Javascript ruining something useful… where webmail isn’t as useful today as it was a decade ago, to the point all this scripted asshattery sent me back to using mail clients; something I figured was on the way of the dodo five or six years ago.