Over the last 10 or so years, web based applications have used HTML.
HTML describes the look and feel of the application to the web
browser, a piece of software on your local computer. The web browser
then interprets the description into a usable ( you hope ) application
capable of interacting with users.
This process has worked extremely well, mostly for lack of viable alternatives.
Anyone who has ever used a computer can tell you that web applications
offer a very simple set of features. With few exceptions, interactions
such as dragging and dropping, using the Right-Click context menus,
and other common computer actions are auspiciously missing from the
web.
The reason behind this is HTML is not an application language. It is a
mark up language for displaying. The original intent was never to have
applications on the web, rather a manner for scientists to share
research.
As the web grew, the javascript language came along to fill the
interactivity gap for websites and web applications. A lot of amazing
things could be done by javascript enhanced applications. A lot of
things also could not be done. One of which was interoperability among
different web browsers.
As I mentioned above, websites and web applications exist on a remote
computer as the description of a visual model. The web browser itself
interprets the description and renders visual content. Partly by
incompetance and partly by conspiracy, different web broswers
interpreted in different ways. Some instructions understood by one
browser would be ignored by another. Worse case, the same instruction
would be rendered in a completely different way.
Through the years, many schemes for managing these differences
emerged. Some developers created different applications for different
browsers thusly escaping the compatibility problems. Some chose to
reduce functionality to the least common denominator. Some chose to
“Internet Enable” their thick client software. Each of these manners
had an inherent set of problems proving tough to overcome for the long
haul.
The folks with different versions for different browsers ran into
serious trouble when making changes to their applications. A change
must be made and tested in multiple copies of code. This expands the
time and resources needed to alter the applications.
The folks with reduced functionality had a hard time competing with
those with enhanced functionality and lost users and sales.
The folks with ‘web-enabled’ thick clients had trouble keeping all of
their users on a particular version. Having multiple versions in use
on a single application is a veritable nightmare to support.
Through it all, the brave web developers slugged it out among
competing technologies, competing versions and competing userbases.
This can be best described by watching a UN meeting transpiring with
all the participants yelling their cases at once and and the
translators dutifly translating into hundreds of languages.
10 years later, HTML is still the dominant presentation language on
the internet. When developing an application, developers commonly
spend a disproportionate amount of time centering a piece of text, or
getting table borders to align properly.
Web applications must be tested on no less than 6 browser/version
combinations, each of which has its own quirks and annoyances. All of
this greatly slows down the pace of innovation and leaves the web
users of the world in the lurch.
This brings me round to my initial statement, I love Flex. Flex is a
technology built on Adobe Flash. Flash is a browser based technology
that renders on all browsers equally. Thus, a description for a table
is rendered EXACTLY the same on all browsers. An image aligned flush
with another image renders EXACTLY the same on all browsers.
Finally, a consolidated presentation language for the web. I can
finally cease spending days on table alignments and on diagnosing
silly padding rendering errors in browsers. I can finally just write
code that visually just works.
I Love Flex.