Communications of the ACM
Html: Still Not All It's Cracked p to Be
The headaches of Web application development are being compounded by the ever-proliferating morass of Web standards, frameworks, and tools, writes InfoWorld's Neil McAllister. He says the many Web development tools behave differently with different browsers, and he notes that "Web developers must constantly balance between supporting the largest possible audience and delivering the user experience the client wants."
McAllister stresses that there are many available toolkits and frameworks—particularly those that are open source—that could help relieve the burden of Web development and make cross-browser compatibility easier. But choosing from the abundance of these tools as well as client-side Web technologies creates additional difficulty for developers.
McAllister sees certain advantages in Web applications built out of proprietary tools. He notes that "a tightly controlled ecosystem backed by a major vendor makes it easier to define best practices, set development targets, and deliver results with a minimum of chaos." McAllister concludes that Web developers urgently need "tools that will help us unify the ones we already have."
From InfoWorld
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