On Windows 8 Metro HTML Apps and the Web Developer Ethos

 

Ethos (noun): The characteristic spirit of a culture, era or community as seen in its beliefs and aspirations.

TL;DR: I hear a lot of people talk about the what the value of offering a way to create "Metro" style apps for Windows 8 using HTML and Javascript is, and I disagree.  I believe the common web developer has a different value system than what the Win 8 "Metro" environment encourages and as a result not many people will end up using the HTML options for creating "Metro" apps on Windows 8.

Current Web Development Values

 - Optimized javascript and css for fast page loading.

     - Combined, Minified JS and CSS

- Load from CDN, fallback to local

 - Simple, short javascript code

 - Reactive and Responsive to different devices.

 

I'll take some liberties and really just boil these down to the following:

 - Fast Page Loading

 - Simple Code

 - Platform Agnostic

Fast Page Loading 

As a web developer I have certain performance implications in mind when I organize my site and its resources.  I like to minify and combine all my script and css files for quicker loading along with loading certain libraries from CDN rather than locally to take advantage of Caching.  The examples I've seen so far tend to have about 87 obscure scripts loading in the head of the page and it makes my face twitch every time I see it.

Simple Code

The WinJS and WinRT namespaces are insanely long and ugly to use.  Again, the average to elite js developer has it ingrained to limit the size of their javascript files for performance.  Using something like WinJS.Class.define(...) or some of the other longer examples for subscribing to certain app events like startup is going to turn off developers to creating apps.  The good thing is that this could be fixed by someone just wrapping all that stuff up in a shorter namespace utility library ($win sounds good).

The javascript examples I've seen so far tend to degrade into this monolithic amount of JS in one file.  There needs to be a better story for architecting javascript heavy solutions.  I think the .Net world isn't used to this type of project yet and it would have been nice to see MS give some guidance about managing them in a responsible way.  I'd like to see a convention based solution that encourages a module + export pattern for managing the complexity of javascript code.

Platform Agnostic

I'll start out by saying that it's unfair when I see people comparing the Metro app development with developing a website.  This is a native app and as such will have a heavy reliance on the underlying platform.  The better comparison for development is that of a ChromeOS application.  On the other hand ChromeOS application doesn't have the same heavy importance on a radical theme/styling for apps like Metro apps will.

Host enforcement rules add an extra layer of security for "Metro" HTML apps by only allowing "safe" html and javascript references.  Host enforcement rules add an extra layer of security at the expense of clean and easy to implement javascript.  The fact is that most web sources are going to not have "safe" html (especially since most data- attributes are considered harmful).

That's all I have for now as far as notes, I'm sure I'll tidy this up a bit for a more official review later on when I've made a couple apps.

Now Playing: Mt Eden - Gambler

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