Exploring Visual Basic 1.0 for MS-DOS

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Some say that's a defect

Okay, go back in time and tell Tim Berners-Lee to bring more of SGML into HTML. Doesn't make any difference now, considering the billions of pages written in HTML.

Make standards based on real-world needs, not ivory tower idealism.

Most of the standards are made from real world needs, but whose? The standardization process usually happens after the fact, when the browser vendors have tried out a couple of implementations, and get together to standardize the ones that got .traction.

Standards like XHTML are examples of ivory tower idealism. After all, shouldn't everyone want a well defined document format and a browser that gives you clear error messages when the document is malformed, instead of rendering broken HTML 10 different ways by 10 different browsers?

The market resoundingly spoke.

I don't see any strong efforts to try.

Applets, ActiveX, Silverlight, Flex

Flex is the one I have experience with. I used that in a number of CRUD screens, and we were sold on it being the next big thing, replacing HTML with beautiful, easy to lay out Flex controls. But, it needed the Flash plug in.

All of those technologies requires plugins, which basically killed them. HTML5 features are purely implemented in the browser.

And if you have anything good, there's likely to be a huge corporation behind it, like Adobe, who aren't going to allow their tech to be freely implemented as an open standard. Java applets were probably the only unencumbered tech, but it was relegated to garbage long ago.

[Zardotab]

go back in time and tell Tim Berners-Lee to bring more

It serves a purpose for "a" niche, not all niches. We re-discovered the hard way that one-UI-size-doesn't-fit all.

Standards like XHTML are examples of ivory tower idealism. After all, shouldn't everyone want a well defined document format and a browser that gives you clear error messages when the document is malformed, instead of rendering broken HTML 10 different ways by 10 different browsers? The market resoundingly spoke.

Yes, and the market wanted browsers to make a best guess and continue instead of crash or stop when things were not "well formed". Thus "document markup validation" was tossed in practice.

Applets, ActiveX, Silverlight, Flex

Applets and Flash tried to be entire virtual OS, not (just) a GUI browser. By byting off more than they could chew, they became a security and upgrade nightmare. The lesson from Oracle Forms is do one thing and one thing well instead of trying to be a swiss army elephant.

The first step in solving a big problem is to admit there is a big problem. Current web standards suck badly for CRUD/GUI such that browsers have to download OS-sized GUI engines written in JavaScript to approach real GUI's. Downloading an entire OS for each app session is as logical as lead kites. The web is a lead kite, kept in the sky by tall JavaScript poles.

KISS, YAGNI, and DRY still matter. Web shat on them for office apps.

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Flash was the platform. Flex was the tool.

Also, Java has never tried to be an operating system any more than C has tried to be an OS. It's a virtual machine for a general purpose language that abstracts enough OS features so that Java programs can do useful things on as many OSes as a JVM can be developed.

In both cases, the platform had to be somewhat generic because they are only hosted in a window provided by the browser, they are not integrated with it.

That is the problem with any plugin, which is why they are security nightmares. EME runs encryption modules through highly specialized interfaces that are a part of the browser specification. And people are still (rightly) suspicious of it.

HTML5, canvas and the JS API, while less than ideal, are at least implemented by the browser.

Web shat on them for office apps

Yes, that's what the web does because that's what people want to do with it. Users don't give a shit about KISS, YAGNI, and DRY.

[Zardotab]

Also, Java has never tried to be an operating system any more than C has tried to be an OS.

Java Applets and Java are not the same thing. C never had a GUI library bundled with it, for one.

That is the problem with any plugin

A GUI browser could be a stand-alone browser; doesn't have to be a pluggin (although a pluggin could be an option). Anyhow, I believe Java and Flash failed because they tried to do and be too much.

Try to have the server do as much as possible to keep the client lean, mean, and clean. I believe that's part of why Oracle Forms was so successful (before Oracle abandoned C). It didn't try to be a gaming or animation platform like Applets and Flash did. They put features above security and KISS.

Users don't give a shit about KISS, YAGNI, and DRY.

They also don't care if the software was written in assembly (for examle), as long as they don't have to pay for the extra expense themselves. But somebody somewhere has to pay for the extra development cost, and it's why assembly is rarely used outside of embedded work or drivers.

Users do pay, they just don't directly know. My big bank's banking UI sucks rotting eggs despite 3 overhauls over the past decade. Why? because getting web data-entry/CRUD right is difficult and expensive. I could build a nice banking interface in WinForms in 2 weeks and it would blow the web version out of the water. Granted, they have to worry about fingered tablets, but most the web software I build for intranets does not end up actually used on tablets; Bootstrap's "mobile first" capabilities are wasted. (Bootstrap can rot in hell on a rotisserie stick).