I have this strange sort of sinking feeling that HTML5 is going to hit the open Internet in much the same way IE6 did. Every player in the game seems to be working in a different direction and the browser is turning into something much more than a vehicle for content.
I know I'm not the only one who believes this is a bad thing.
Right now that can't happen. Market share is dictating a productive environment for HTML5 that forces standard compliant behaviour. Until a browser comes out on top it's unlikely we'll see anything similar to what IE6 did to the web for sometime.
Except Google adding whatever they feel like to Chrome and feature hungry devs pushing users to Chrome because MSIE lacks "HTML5 support", when what they mean is that they want to use last week's experimental APIs in production sites today.
And only writing for webkit when doing mobile. Screw Firefox, or Opera or webstandards in general. Weehoo iPhone! (May also not break on Android)
It's already a strong trend. I say the fear is justified.
Except in mobile, where webkit is the only game in town. In fact, I think we're already seeing web developers write mobile sites that only work in webkit.
At a glance, this looks like a rather elegant solution to the problem of adding optional type-markers to JS without completely destroying the nature of the language (as AS3 did, IMO).
What about debug support? I wont be using anything like Coffeescript or TypeScript until they get their Code Mapping down for debugging. Until then its nothing more than a cute novelty.
People claiming that its "not that hard to track down issues" without proper code mapping, just aren't working on a large enough codebase.
Uhhh.. I hope Microsoft understands that JavaScript isn't popular because of language features or syntax, it's popular because of widespread browser support.
The problem is that the main benefit is a misdirection (syntax similar to javascript), on top of that this doesn't add anything different than coffee script or Dart already does.
This is a language without a proposal just to keep microsoft in the game.
Since Google and Mozilla have a javascript alternative we need one too
This is very different than my understanding of coffee script and dart in that it is a superset of JS. This means you can incrementally make use of and learn it.
MS came with a different approach. Rather than recreating the language of the web they asked how they van make it better.
I know I'm not the only one who believes this is a bad thing.