The Eric Wroolie Blog

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HTML5, it’s DHTML all over again

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I watched a video from MIX 2011 called “HTML5 for Silverlight Developers” last night and it was very compelling.  I was all on-board.  I would prefer to not code things in Silverlight and give my clients the caveat—“but it won’t work on an iPad”.  So, I whipped out Visual Studio and started to code.

There is something very cool about being able to code something and not have to wonder if they client has Silverlight installed.  This was awesome.

Except . . . nothing works in a browser below IE9 or Chrome or Firefox or whatever.  IE6 through IE8 didn’t work at all.

I myself am a Chrome user and gave up IE long ago unless a contract requires that I use it. But most corporate environments are a long way from upgrading to IE 8, let alone the latest IE9.

After doing some googling, I found the HTML5 shim which allows things to render properly in IE and the ExplorerCanvas javascript plugin to allow using the canvas in IE.  So, there are work-arounds.  However, these plugins allowed me to do basic things in IE8—but failed in other areas.  For example, with these plugins I could draw a rectangle on the canvas in IE8—but I couldn’t implement the drag/drop interface.

At one point, I had 5 different browsers open and was refreshing each one after making a change to my html.  Ever time, at least one of them failed.  If I tried to cater for a quirk in IE, Chrome would stop working.  When I got it working in Chrome, IE would give an ugly javascript error.

But this is nothing new.

Back in 1999, I bought an big Microsoft book called “Dynamic HTML” which espoused DHTML as the future of the web.  It gave loads of examples on how to create animations and include very cool stuff in your pages.  DHTML was term used by Netscape and IE, but this book focused entirely on Internet Explorer.  When you tried to run your same code in the counterpart Netscape browsers, nothing rendered at all and you ended up with javascript errors.  The book got around the cross-browser difficulties by ignoring all other browsers.  If you worked in a corporate environment and would never code on anything but Internet Explorer, DHTML (or the Microsoft version of it) was great.

DHTML was a broad term (as is HTML 5) and doesn’t belong to company.  You code to a certain specification and each browser (or device) renders that as they see fit.  You have very little control over how it will look unless you code with a plugin like Flash (and now, Silverlight).

I have seen fantastic DHTML animations in IE which only worked in IE.  I can remember seeing stunning animations in Netscape which didn’t work in IE (all using ‘layer’ tags).  I remember last year seeing a cool Arcade Fire video in HTML 5 which worked great in Chrome but not in IE.  There is still no consistency here.

The “HTML5 for Silverlight developers” video was a lot like the DHTML book.  It looks great until you dig deeper.

The reason I’m hesitant to jump on the HTML5 bandwagon (and I reeeallly want to) is Internet Explorers slow adoption of it.  Actually, it’s not Internet Explorer—since they are implementing a lot of new features in IE9, but most corporate environments won’t take up the new browser for at least one or two years.  So, if you put something on the web, you have to think about the large amount of lunchtime surfers who won’t even be able to see your page.  You need to write loads of conditional code just to make sure your down-level browsers can even see a message saying “Not supported by your browser” instead of a javascript “Errors in page” popup.

One thing you should never ask your clients is “What browser versions do you want this to support?”  The answer is always the same—“Well, all of them.”  This is why the IE-only inventions of the past (HTML+Time, background filters, etc) never took off.  This is why a lot of the HTML5 features—as cool as they are—won’t take off either.  We Chrome users don’t carry enough weight yet to move the entire world to the newer code.  If Apple had allowed Flash on the iPad, I don’t think anyone would care about HTML5 at all.

I want to be converted and go back to plug-in-less web development. But so far, HTML5 (or rather, the browser creators) have let us down.

Looking forward to Silverlight 5

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So, I watched the Silverlight Firestarter keynote where some of the Silverlight 5 features were revealed and have to say that it all looks really good. 

There were some pretty impressive interfaces demo’d. 

I’m so tired of hearing how Microsoft is dumping Silverlight.  The keynote alleviated some of those fears, I hope.

The biggest benefit, I think, will be the ability to put breakpoints in xaml databinding.  Most of the Silverlight problems I have are trying to figure out if the INotifyPropertyChanged event was fired for an element in my gui. 

So, life will be easier . . . by the end of next year.

Homework

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I was terrible about doing homework when I was a kid.  It was always so much easier to think of the excuse I was going to use the next day than it was to turn off the TV and just do it.

I can remember too many occasions when the teacher would collect homework and try to name-and-shame me in front of the class.  “Where is your homework, Eric?”

“I didn’t do it,” I said while looking down at my desk and hoping the teacher would just move on to someone else.  I figured if I looked pitiful enough, he would leave me alone.

“Well, why didn’t you do it?” he would insist.  I could see his legs at the edge of my desk as he towered above me waiting for an answer.  He wasn’t going to accept that as my only answer. The whole class’ attention was on me.  I could feel my face getting hot with embarrassment, but hey, Knight Rider was worth it.

So, I gave the teacher the go-to answer for everything.  I give him the answer that I’m sure all teachers loathe—“I forgot.”

Towards the end of the school year, they usually gave up on me.  My parents tried everything to get me to do my homework, too.  But it was so easy to lie about how much homework I had.  Besides, I had a busy schedule starting with He-Man at 3:30 and ending with whatever prime time show was on that night before 9.

As I got older, the homework load got heavier and the likelihood of me doing it was much smaller.  My aversion to homework, along with my truancy habit, were the reasons I failed several classes in high school and went to Summer school ever year to make them up. My dad still talks about how he wasn’t sure whether I would graduate from high school at all.  I never even applied to any colleges.

I can remember my mom telling me that homework was a part of life and that I would get homework all the time when I grew up and went to work.  I didn’t really believe this.  Grown-ups don’t have any homework.

Now, I do have homework.  But here’s the big difference—the homework is not mandatory.  That really makes it difficult to do.

Now, I will sit down in the evenings with a big computer book read chapter after boring chapter of a subject which might not interest me in the slightest, but I need to know it.  I look at this homework the same way I look at running on a cold morning—there are hundreds of reasons not to do it, but one or two compelling reasons to do it.

Now, my job is to stay competitive and relevant in a market that is always moving.  Now I must stay ahead of technology that is always shifting.  Now, I sell the skills and knowledge that’s contained in between my ears.  My competition for work is not just in London, but in America, China, India, and the rest of the world.

So, I have to keep building that knowledge.  That means homework and studying.  What makes it easier is that not everyone does this.  To many people, if the boss doesn’t demand it, or if it can’t be a prominent bullet-point on the cv, it’s not worth learning.  The phrase I hear again and again is “The last thing I want to do when I get home from a long day at work is think about computers.”

But I’ve also worked with a lot of really good people who will browse the tech manuals on the trains or watch tutorial videos in the evenings to constantly educate themselves too.

I remember listening to a Brian Tracy tape years ago where he said (I’m paraphrasing), that you give eight hours to your employer and ever added hour goes to building you.

So, now I know the importance of homework and evening study.  Life would have been a lot easier if I learned it earlier.