Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

[Gustavo Noronha Silva <gns gnome org>]

On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 21:31 -0600, Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 9:18 PM, Jim Gettys <jg freedesktop org> wrote:
>         The combination of technologies going under the name "HTML 5"
>         have made/are making web technology based applications finally
>         competitive with those built using conventional toolkits such
>         as Qt, GTK+, and the Windows and Mac equivalents.
>         
>         This provides a major opportunity; but I have seen little
>         thought or discussion of how Gnome can/should take advantage
>         of this.
> 
> 
> That's why Shell is JS and CSS.

I think you missed the point on this one. Sure, Shell uses JavaScript,
and CSS, but the real power of HTML5 is on the whole engine/standard,
not on the languages you use to interact with it.

We can do all kinds of effects, media playing, very complex UIs,
client-side storage, and databases, 3D, "multi-threaded" workers,
workers that share work between pages, all of that you can do in HTML
these days, and all of them interact very seamlessly with the others, so
you can apply transitions to media, and 3D. Things we could barely do
with our platform until recently (if we can at all right now) are
already possible in a modern web rendering engine, and that is a scary
thought.

All of that is available through a standardized API[1] that loads of
developers are already beginning to learn, and that we could perhaps
take advantage of in our platform. We have at least 2 very good engines
to work with, and thinking of ways to use their power to our advantage.

Shell could just as well use Python, and some non-standard theming tool.
JS and CSS only help leverage web developer programming/theming
knowledge of the languages, not the power of what HTML5 and its standard
APIs are providing. I think what Jim Gettys says is a very important
question, and we should factor it into our thoughts for the future.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html

See you,

-- 
Gustavo Noronha Silva <gns gnome org>
GNOME Project