Saturday, December 22, 2012; 2:41:56 PM Eastern
The easy stuff should be easy
- Anyone who's trying to create a platform should keep this in their mind when making decisions about which way to go. The point of making a platform is to encapsulate something that you've finally figured out how to simplify. Then you put the complex stuff behind an interface, and it becomes easy.
I like to visualize a very huge ball at the end of a very long chain. I have it between my index finger and thumb, and with the least effort possible I should be able to make the ball swing as fast as I want in exactly the direction I want it to go. That's my idea of power. - There's a huge opportunity to simplify now that the web browser is being used as an application environment. We're pushing the envelope now further than we did in the age of desktop applications. But we've already simplified that once before, as the desktop platform matured. So I don't have any doubt that the simplification of the browser programming environment is coming. It will happen because it is happening. ;-)
- Things we need all the time are getting simplified, factored -- and standards are emerging. jQuery, for sure that's a standard. And more and more so is Bootstrap Toolkit. But it can get simplified further. What we're doing now is exactly what we did in the early-mid 80s as we went from character-based apps to graphic apps. We know how to simplify here. And Bootstrap is very much on the path.
- When I build in Bootstrap I have to worry much less about whether it will run in all browsers. And browser-makers should be sure they don't break Bootstrap apps or jQuery apps. The platform is being elevated. And the stuff that should be easy is becoming easy.