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Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

  > I can't get over there are iOS fanboys out there still
  > with their heads so far in the sand.

Those iOS fanboys are just knowledgeable enough. Why don't you spend some time and educate yourself on a couple of things. First, where the first usage of the cornerstones of modern web tech appeared in the wild: I mean <canvas>, CSS transitions and animations. You may be surprised. Second, learn a bit what native SDKs offer. Once you know the state of "modern web" and the state of modern mobile OSes SDKs you may be less tempted to try to compare them. Trying to portray web stack as superior is laughable and the person making such claim probably has his head in the darker place than sand.

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> Trying to portray web stack as superior is laughable and the person making such claim probably has his head in the darker place than sand.

No such claim was made. He simply pointed out (correctly) that the mobile web is in much better shape than it is being given credit for. In that, I agree.

Ah, yes. Assume I'm ignorant about the technology you claim is superior (the exact same thing happened the last time I tried to point out that the web has advanced a bit in the last 10 years). I didn't even try to make any claim about the web being better than native, but for your own knowledge, I have experience with native SDKs from win32, to cocoa, to android and iOS.

>Trying to portray web stack as superior is laughable

In what regard? Surely not in ease of development? Ease of learning? Ease/portability/availability of tools? Portability of the end app itself? Available developer pool? Open source code to look at and use? I can't imagine a way that any native platform beats the web in any of those categories.

Or just in terms of making a fancy animation and having reusable UI elements? You're probably right, but oh wait, if only you'd investigated Shadow DOM and Polymers like I recommended you'd see that web technologies are rapidly advancing on that front as well.

> Surely not in ease of development?

Nope. Building a complex application in JS+HTML+CSS is still an enormously painful undertaking.

> Ease of learning?

Also nope. Complex applications are still complex.

> Ease/portability/availability of tools?

Compared to the development tools for other platforms (IDEs, profilers, etc), the web tools are far, far, far more limited.

> Portability of the end app itself?

Portability is a cost-cutting measure, but never a user-appreciated feature. The web would need to stand alone as a first-tier platform for this to be a net gain; as it is, web-only experience is subpar.

> Available developer pool?

Quality engineers capable of producing first-class applications for your users still cost a lot and are rare on the ground.

> Open source code to look at and use?

This is not even remotely unique to the web.

> You're probably right, but oh wait, if only you'd investigated Shadow DOM and Polymers like I recommended you'd see that web technologies are rapidly advancing on that front as well.

Catching up to 1990s application architecture is not really a cause to celebrate. The technology stack that drives desktop and mobile devices is massive. We don't build custom interfaces directly on top of OpenGL and call it a day.

Hmm, I suspect that the comparison is relative, whereas many of your comments are absolute. E.g. Quality engineers are certainly hard to find, but are good javascript developers _harder_ or _easier_ to find than iOS developers? I don't really know, but I suspect that good javascript developers are easier to find. Also, I think web-development tools are pretty on par to xcode.

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