
Tim Bray in the Garden of Good and Evil - blasdel
http://chipotle.tumblr.com/post/453496695/tim-bray-in-the-garden-of-good-and-evil
======
alayne
This is not the first time I've heard this bait and switch tactic. The
critical point that is muddled is that the web is not the Internet.
Furthermore, an iPhone is a general purpose computing device and not limited
to web applications. I don't believe for a minute that HTML5 solves this. For
example, a major selling point of the iPhone is its iPod multimedia
functionality which is an application.

Because you may want to do more with the Internet than access HTTP and because
you have a device that does much more than access web pages, control over the
applications on that device is a freedom issue. The partial freedom of web
access is not the same as actual freedom. If I give the author the benefit of
the doubt and believe he isn't clueless, then his spin on reality must be
considered deceptive. It's misdirection. To alter a line in the article, when
he refuses to distinguish between the Internet and the web and web access
freedom and software freedom, he knows what he's doing.

I understand you may freely choose to not buy an iPhone, but Apple has gained
a certain leverage in the market that can't simply be ignored. As an
individual I can ignore it. As a company with competitive interest in mobile
applications, you could not easily ignore it.

------
WilliamLP
Mine is not a popular opinion and I'll probably lose comment karma for stating
it. But Apple wants HTML5 to succeed precisely because it is an absolutely
terrible platform on which to develop apps and games. Therefore, it gives them
the illusion of supporting openness while being safe from actually competing
against their own dev tools.

A lot of geeks love JavaScript and I've never figured out why, having
developed in it. (Yes I've read Crockford.) The logic seems to go like this:
sure it has problems but functions are first class objects! This means it's
like Lisp and everyone knows Lisp is the best! As far as I can tell, arguments
for JavaScript being usable don't tend to go much farther than this.

~~~
swannodette
Some applications work best on the web. Some applications work best natively.
I don't really see this is an either/or thing.

I've been doing Cocoa programming and heavy amounts of JavaScript for some
time now. Anything bad one camp says about the other is pure FUD. Objective-J
is but one example of proof in the pudding. I myself work on a codebase that's
nearly 25,0000 lines of JavaScript with a design heavily lifted from my
experience with Cocoa. JavaScript's expressive power makes this possible, even
trivial.

Yet, JavaScripts tooling support is just subpar compared to Apple's. While
people complain about XCode, it makes FireBug look like a toy.

Also pretty much everything for building interfaces is just Precambrian
compared to Apple's. Code generation for UI must die.

I could go on and on.

As far as the article is concerned: Android, Windows 7 Mobile, and iPhone are
all lockins if you develop native apps for them. You have non portable code
(unless you're writing a game) who cares how "open" the platform is.

It's too early to see how all of this will play out but I guess that doesn't
stop everyone from hand-waving every chance they get.

------
theBobMcCormick
Either the author is pretty obtuse, or he's deliberately misrepresenting
Bray's comparisons between the web and the iPhone app ecosystem. I thought it
was pretty clear in Bray's original post that he wasn't try to say that Apple
was censoring the internet, but was using the internet as an example of the
virtues of uncensored, unrestricted innovation as compared to the highly
restricted environment in the App store.

And of course, as others have already pointed out, saying the mobile Safari's
HTML5 support is an acceptable alternative for apps that aren't allowed into
the App store is as completely stupid now as it was when Apple released the
original iPhone without a local app SDK: [http://gizmodo.com/267899/no-iphone-
sdk-means-no-killer-ipho...](http://gizmodo.com/267899/no-iphone-sdk-means-no-
killer-iphone-apps)

~~~
rue
_> Either the author is pretty obtuse, or he's deliberately misrepresenting
Bray's comparisons between the web and the iPhone app ecosystem. I thought it
was pretty clear in Bray's original post that he wasn't try to say that Apple
was censoring the internet, [...]_

Bray _was_ trying to say that, I assume, but not exactly clearly. These quotes
easily cause confusion about what he is describing:

 _"The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex,
and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say
what."_

 _"Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at
the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack
can be accessed and what developers can say to each other."_

[http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/Joining-
Go...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/Joining-Google)

------
zmmmmm
This is a disingenuous, deliberate misinterpretation of what Bray said.

------
brisance
Would like to remind fellow readers that the original iPhone was shipped
without the iPhone SDK with Steve Jobs pushing for web-based applications, yet
Apple was roundly criticized for it.

<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iphone.html>

------
naner
Obnoxious drivel like this is perhaps one of the most powerful arguments for
having downvote arrows available.

~~~
benmathes
If your overall score reaches a certain level, you get downvote arrows.

~~~
astine
Not for articles.

------
ableal
Side note: I got curious about this bit

 _Have you seen Ibis Reader [<http://ibisreader.com/>] ? This thing installs
from the web, sure, but it installs. You don’t need to be online to use it
read your books._

I thought it might be similar to the FireFox EPub reader plug-in (
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/45281> ), but for KHTML/Webkit
based browsers, and dug a bit on the website.

It may well be, but I found no way to download the plug-in (with Firefox).
Apparently the makers want to channel the book finding (in Feedbooks, etc.)
through a login in their own site. I suppose that _then_ the plugin gets
loaded, but didn't test that.

