The Chains that Hold Us Back

I’m not sure there’s ever been quite as much activity in the world of Web development as in the past couple of years.  The browser ‘wars’ have been re-ignited, and technology is advancing at a frantic pace.  It’s almost too much to keep up with.  Right now as a web developer you have Silverlight 2 at your disposal, and a beta of Silverlight 3, with talks of Silverlight 4 already taking place.  Then there’s the CSS 3 specs, HTML 5 specs.. it’s almost too much to comprehend.  I guess we’re lucky in a way, that there are currently significant barriers keeping us from these technologies.

Let’s take a look at Silverlight first.  With clear advantages in performance and usability over standard HTML/JavaScript, Silverlight looked like a definite winner for many web applications.  But Silverlight suffers from one big disadvantage – the plugin that needs to be installed.  That simple plugin which only takes a minute to install, is preventing widespread adoption of Silverlight across corporate America.  As with any new software, IT must first test Silverlight on their systems, and then come up with a rollout plan which as many of you know, is not something that happens overnight.  So even with 3 versions of Silverlight in 1 year, many developers are just now getting the nod from corporate to start discussing the option of using Silverlight. 

CSS3 and HTML5 promise to change web development (in a good way), but are both being held back by standards committees and browser support (or lack there of).  In all likelihood browsers will implement the features of these specs before the specs are actually complete.  But even the implementation will likely happen at different rates for each browser.  The reason most of us write web applications in the first place is so that one page can be viewed in any browser on any computer by any user.  Which brings us back to IT, the guys who will inevitably be forced to hold back the latest versions of these browsers from being installed, so that they can be properly tested and a deployment strategy can be planned. 

While all of these new technologies promise to revolutionize web development, it’s unlikely the revolution will happen as quickly as any of us would like to see.  IE6 is still the corporate standard browser in many organizations.  The good news for developers is that it gives you extra time to learn the new technologies.  And if there’s one thing I know, it’s that you can accelerate rollouts if you prove a valid business case.  Show the IT director a prototype of the app you just put together using Silverlight 3 that took you half the time to write and solved the UX and Performance problems of the current html based application, and a Silverlight rollout is likely to be around the corner.