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Comment by devongovett | Hacker News Reader

Except it's entirely standards based. Canvas is part of HTML5 and the apps are built entirely in JavaScript. And the whole framework is open source with no proprietary components. Not sure how you got to those conclusions.

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I don't mean to overreact, but so were <object> and <embed>, which were what Flash used. If they're creating their own canvas-based way of rendering a UI, it's not really using HTML5... it's just that HTML5 happens to be the container.

And just because it's open source, doesn't mean it's standards-based.

I'll have to dig deeper, but things like "HTML and CSS independent" feel very proprietary to me. It just feels like you're losing out on the shared semantic value of HTML, etc.

That doesn't make any sense. Canvas is a standard maintained as part of HTML5 by the W3C. How are they "not really using HTML5"? Just because they don't have some tags? That makes no sense. The web is not HTML and CSS. People need to get over that.

As for semantics and stuff, this isn't designed for documents at all, which HTML is perfectly suited for. This is designed for native-style applications in the browser where semantics don't really mean anything anyway. And like I said in my article, accessibility is taken care of.

The Web is HTML. HTTP is Hyper Text Transport Protocol. I think you're advocating for a JSTP that just cuts out HTML and CSS entirely. And at that point, why not just serve up compiled JS since it will be less bandwidth, right? Goodbye open web.

For compiling JS to be widely used, there has to be a decompiler or interpreter in most major browsers. It's no different than distributing binaries written in any compiled language.

How does this damage the open web?

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