At the end of the day all it would take is one of the 3 major browser vendors to offer an alternative. That alternative could be distributed to a large percentage of desktops in a relatively quick manner saving billions if not trillions of dollars in wasted productivity.

It will never happen though.

* EDIT: This comes from someone who uses React, Redux, webpack, etc.. daily

Not that I even like XML. But having another XML dialect that's not actual XML shows that the only hope is to build valid tools and abstractions on top of all the crud.

Or write content/metadata schemas (distinct from a DTD schema that simply describes html5) using XSD?

Unlike xhtml, my understanding, was that the current tooling around XML won't just work out-of-the-box for html5.

You can parse HTML 5 into XML using my HTML 5 DTD [1] and eg. OpenSP's osx tool or my upcoming sgmljs.net tool.

What do you have against DTDs? They do the same as XSD, and then some.

[1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html5.html

HTML is based on SGML, it was never an XML dialect.

You mean like Dart?

Besides, languages that target WebAssembly are almost certainly going to evolve to fit that space.

The idea that all of sudden there is going to be a rush to push compiled/closed sites after so many very successful years of using free-and-open stacks seems rather non-logical to me.

Time will tell.

Sorry, this ship has sailed.

Well, then we have minified JS that isn't exactly readable. Similarly with multiple-compiled JSX-to-ES6-to-ES5/JS code.

Also, there's a number of JS obfuscators, whose main purpose is to smuggle a piece of closed code into those theoretically “free-and-open” stacks.

Thus, I think, after wasm becomes generally supported, there will be more incentive to write code in your language of choice and compile it to a common platform, than to write code in JS or one of its derivatives and minify/compile it anyway.

It's worth noting WebAssembly isn't compiled into a form only computers can understand. There are plans to offer 'View Source'-style functionality for WebAssembly. WASM is a compressed AST rather than hardware-specific bytecode.

And are already but now targeting JS. Like PureScript, ReasonML, Elm and even TypeScipt to some extend.

The correct comparison there is Dart. WebAssembly is a joint effort being developed by a team comprised of folks from every major browser vendor, so it isn't really an example of what they're talking about.

https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6682831673622528

Yes.

I've worked with CMake, Gradle, Maven, Ant, with webpack, makefiles, and the entire rest. And you know what? I went back to ES5, just because it's easier than fighting the JS environment. Comparing your average build.gradle with a webpack config is downright insane.

Why does the web environment have to be so much more complicated than the native world? The web could be so much more powerful if they'd study history, and learn from it.

Half the problem with the web stack is inexperienced people making things way more complicated than they need to be. A minimal webpack.config is pretty damn simple.

I'd encourage every developer considering Electron to give Qt/QML a try. It merges the declarative nature of WPF with a nicer syntax and the ability to use JS directly in the QML file, obliterating the need for converters of formatters (that plague XAML/WPF and JavaFX). Writing custom components is trivial and intuitive, with zero syntactic overhead (if a QML file "MyCompX" is present, you can instantiate its contents with "MyCompX" without any additional setup).

For Android, it has the advantage of being able to hot-reload the UI without jumping through hoops (simply serve them over HTTP and install a small reload handler in your app that can be triggered either from the app of by something like a UDP message from the host). (Change one like in the app's main and you are able to pull the QML files from a local directory so you can modify them on the tablet without a PC or internet connection ...)

I'm actually reluctant to mention Qt/QML because I consider it to be my secret magic silver bullet for portable (non-web) UI development.

Regarding the license (there's a lot of misinformation, including Qt's main site trying to coerce you into using the commercial license): if you link dynamically, commercial usage is not a problem (LGPL). (This is usually only an issue on iOS.)

The recent Electron situation (needed on one hand, loathed on the other hand) is a unique opportunity for Qt to gain (back) some developer mind share, but to avoid alienating web developers with scary C++ stuff it would help to decouple QtCreator from the Qt C++ API: offering a version that only exposes the QML editor and interface generator, and ships qmlscene as execution runtime and an option to deploy the QML-only application with a rebranded qmlscene (embedding the QML resources and a custom icon). To be clear: this all exists right now, but with the C++ part enabled (which will scare off some developers even if they can create applications without it).

For me it's exactly the other way around. If I'm using Qt it's because I want to use C++ to make my app as efficient as possible in terms of CPU and memory usage. Now that JavaScript is in the picture, I'm less likely to consider Qt for a cross platform app because I can just as well use any of the other more popular options like Electron or ReactNative.

Qt used to be a C++ GUI framework. Rebranding it as something else won't work. They won't get the web crowd and they will alienate people who want to avoid web technology.

Actually, Java, C++,QT and co are going through great length to make development simpler and all the compilation pipelines easier. Let's take Java for instance, groovy, maven and war packaging considerably made Java server development easier. Java frameworks like Spring are trying very hard to make servlet development easier, by making complexity opt-in. Java is getting constructs like modules which will help with library development, C++ too, QT is streamlining its API ... So I'd totally disagree about your statement. The success of Go yet another proof of this. People are tired with unnecessary complexity and are ready to give up on "elegance" for the sake of simplicity.

My point is that building complex software inherently involves _some_ amount of complexity on the development side, which is reflected in the language syntax and tooling used with that language. Now that people are building complex apps in Javascript, we're seeing catch-up in the tools used to build Javascript apps to match the tools that have existed for years on the desktop/native side.

Building Java applications using Undertow with a build setup in gradle is not _that_ different from a node.js service using Express and package.json for dependencies, or a Ruby, Sinatra and Rake stack. After having tried all three, I ended up going back to the JVM. It's not a perfect ecosystem, but it's damned good one.

Also there's definitely been some cross pollination of ideas from at least the Ruby world to the Java (Rails inspiring Grails and probably Play too), so it's getting better. Add java8 lambdas, and it's quite nice.

Aren't you optimistic.

https://github.com/search?l=Maven+POM&q=pom.xml&type=Code&ut...

https://github.com/search?l=Gradle&q=build.gradle&type=Code&...

And that's public github, which is supposed to be more cutting edge than the legacy code that powers most companies. I started a project with gradle on my last team and everyone complained because they had never used it before.

Complicated things exist.