Historically, you could trust the web *not* to expand it's capability footprint. In the comparative lens, this means it's a dead language. You'll never expect it to keep up and deliver what you need to enable the new experiences you will want to deliver. FOMO suppresses interest
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Replying to @slightlylate @tobie and
How do you work against this? A steady string of safe-but-capable expansions that meet clearly-articulated developer needs. And the "steady" part matters. If we pull up the drawbridge at any point and say "no more!", everyone will understand the web can't support them.
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Replying to @slightlylate @tobie and
Now, of course, this is exactly what some vendors have done. Little surprise, then, that tools like Electron have gotten traction in their proverbial backyards.
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Replying to @slightlylate @tobie and
Every metaplatfrom naturally expands to provide capabilities developers need and that is available on *most* hardware and *most* OSes -- or that metaplatform dies.
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Replying to @slightlylate @tobie and
The web is not immune to this effect! If the capabilities that most computers expose continue to march on, but the web does not, developers would be fools to bet on us. We'd let them down eventually if we aren't a good partner.
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Replying to @slightlylate @tobie and
This brings us to adjacency: most apps spend most of their time and code handling events and drawing boxes & text. But that isn't what they *do*. They often do something *adjacent* to text and box drawing that defines what the app "is".
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Replying to @slightlylate @tobie and
Those adjacent things are often disjoint! Adding `getUserMedia()` didn't enable better RSS reading. And so what? It *did* enable whole classes of apps that otherwise wouldn't have been on the web *in general*. And the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts.
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Replying to @slightlylate @tobie and
That follows from the power of links: if you can't link to it, it isn't on the web. And if you can't bring certain classes of apps to the linkable set, then the whole is less powerful *even if most apps never exercise that power*.
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Replying to @slightlylate @tobie and
These are flywheel effects; every app that's outside your platform creates more incentives not to develop on it. Everyone's looking sideways at what "everyone else" does.
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Replying to @slightlylate @tobie and
A further (key) subtelty: most metaplatforms are happy to optimise for the short-term. They tend to build direct pass-throughs to underlying native systems in order to quickly gain market share (see also: Cordova, Electron, etc.). These incidentally tie developers to OSes.
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That is, they become instantly FOMO-free for the low, low cost of selling platform optionality that doesn't materialize in practice.
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Replying to @slightlylate @tobie and
The web has taken a different path. We fully abstract (to the greatest extent possible) underlying OSes and platforms. It's why we *do* standards at all.
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