Actual Analysis: Is HTML 5 already outmoded?

Steering around Apple

A survey conducted for Forrester Research and Dr. Dobb's Journal cited by Jeffrey Hammond in his report, shows 39% of responding companies as using AJAX as their primary RIA development platform (with Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX being the principal provider). Other platforms, including Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, the Google Web Toolkit, and the Dojo Toolkit rounded out the list. The word "Apple" is nowhere to be found.

But that didn't stop Apple CEO Steve Jobs from positioning himself and his company as the champions of HTML 5, in his open letter published last week. Ostensibly, the subject of Jobs' letter was Flash video versus H.264 video. Yet veteran Apple watchers know that what Jobs wants is a world with no middleware, especially if the world all belongs to Apple.

"The reality is that, if vendors can create platforms that are distinct to their hardware, to their applications, they stand to be able to charge a premium for playing in that platform," Forrester's Hammond told Betanews. "Apple certainly has that down. If you look at what Microsoft's doing with Windows Phone, the programming model is going to be Silverlight or XNA. Everybody looks back to the glory days of the Windows world, where Microsoft made a ton of money on the platform, and it was the apps that made a lot of organizations and software companies a lot of money. I think everybody would love to have the days back when you had native apps that ran on these devices that you could charge premiums for. So I think there is an awful lot of politicking going on."

Does any single vendor benefit more from this approach from any other? "The folks that benefit most from a new standard are the folks that don't necessarily have a commanding position in the existing standard," Hammond responded. "So you could argue that if Microsoft and Adobe have more of a commanding position in the world of PCs and laptops, then Apple and Google stand to benefit because, when you put a new standard out there, it forces everybody to change their architectures and potentially cede control. So I do see it as a competitive weapon, if for no other reason than to force folks to learn new programming languages, to learn new techniques, and consider new options. Because if you have to learn a new way to program, or you have to learn a new set of libraries, you're much more likely to look for a new tool that is the best tool to do that programming, or a new browser that is the best way to serve that content up, or a new device that's the best way to render it. It creates an inflection point in the market that can result in organizations being able to win share."

Such an inflection point can exist for HTML 5, Hammond believes, at some point in time. It could come when enough vendors invest in the standard, or "pre-standard," or "candidate," that the cost of development tools and training goes down. When that happens, the need for browsers (or whatever our descendants will call them) to utilize conditional code to check which RIA platform is turned on, and the need for developers to test their output on multiple platforms, will subside. Then, and only then, will AJAX developers start migrating to HTML 5.

It's hard not to notice the sheer number of vendors in the RIA platform market -- a number that's only increasing, even though the #5 player may only have a 5% market share. In another era, an analyst might have proclaimed this a sure sign of an immature market -- one that has yet to feel the impact of the inevitable "shakeout" period, where the dominating vendor swallows up all the little ones, and developers choose the One Method that's declared the de facto standard. But having played in this market and markets like it directly, Jeffrey Hammond sees there's a new and different factor at play, one which makes it impossible for anyone to apply the old market template to this new world.

"I think we are looking at a different evolutionary pattern, and what's different is the commoditizing power of open source and the number of developers that are intrinsically motivated to participate. So if you look at things like Prototype and Script.aculo.us or jQuery or DWR, or some of the multiple choices you have in the AJAX market... it seems that every time one goes away, or a commercial vendor runs out of runway from a venture cap standpoint, there's another new innovation in the open source space that is ready to step in and take the place," remarked Forrester's Hammond. "I think that there is a bit of a different dynamic, and it's just because of the amount of commoditization in development tools in general with respect to open source.

"What happens when the market congeals? The vendors get bigger, they slow down the pace of innovation, they charge customers more, and a gap opens up between the little guys in the market that have relatively modest needs, and the big guys in the market that have more money than they have time. And previously, what would happen was, the little guys would either have to ante up and pay the price, or they'd be out of luck and they'd have to wait for the next wave of innovation to come on. Now, that constant set of innovations that are going on in the open source world is making the market turn over a lot faster."
Perhaps someone should send a Western Union telegram to the folks at W3C: Open source -- one of the foundation principles of the organization -- works against it when it holds fast against the tide of progress that open source unleashes, and sets itself to the production of a single de jure standard for different categories of functionality.

To that argument, Hammond added, "Maybe there needs to be a little bit more Apache in the way [W3C] works, at least from a standards perspective. If you look at some of the things that we're seeing with cloud computing, and things like Hadoop and Cassandra and some of the database caching products, the way in which we build applications on the Web is changing really quickly. It's almost created two industries, from an architectural perspective. It's not clear to me that anything that we're doing from a standards perspective is really helping that evolution to take a course where there's a lot of interoperability."