The point has been missed: Brick, in many cases, *is* the polyfill. Brick makes doing things that developer want and need easier, because the web is a blank slate and developers don't want to start from scratch. Firefox and Firefox OS still don't support <input type="date"> and nobody wants to use jQuery UI, but you can use the <x-datepicker> component instead. I'd expect to see brick components that polyfill the incredibly frustrating lack of other HTML5 inputs in Gecko (<input type="color">, anybody?), and I'd also expect to see Brick fill in some of the controls that Android and iOS provide to app developers that are either non-existant on the web or not developer friendly (slide-out hamburger menus, anybody?). Potch has informally demoed to me some really cool components that, IIRC, solve some of the biggest issues that Facebook brought up when they switched their apps from HTML5 to native.
In the end, it really doesn't matter how many bikesheds you build out of Brick so long as it does what it claims to do: help people who build apps to build apps. And right now, we've got less than 2000 apps in the Marketplace: it doesn't matter if the apps look like Gaia, Android, iOS, or Apple Newton or if they use one-off APIs that are going to be thrown out in six months. If we don't have developers building apps for the web, we've completely failed at making the web the platform. End of story. Maybe we should bring in Steve Ballmer in his newfound free time to do a motivational speech about how to approach developers. ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Ascher" <[email protected]> To: "Julien Wajsberg" <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected], "Fred Wenzel" <[email protected]>, "Bill Maggs" <[email protected]>, "Fabrice Desre" <[email protected]>, "apps" <[email protected]>, [email protected], "Ben Francis" <[email protected]>, "dev-gaia" <[email protected]>, "Mark Giffin" <[email protected]>, "Stefan Arentz" <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, September 6, 2013 6:03:57 AM Subject: Re: Introducing Brick: Web Components for Apps Development On 2013-09-06, at 1:48 PM, Julien Wajsberg <[email protected]> wrote: > Le 05/09/2013 19:46, Fabrice Desre a écrit : >> On 09/05/2013 10:42 AM, Stefan Arentz wrote: >>> The problem is that we are sending out mixed messages. >>> >>> By saying ‘develop for the open web!’ we are basically saying, do not >>> create packaged apps and use the lowest common denominator when it comes to >>> cross-browser API availability. In practice that means: do not use Firefox >>> OS specific WebAPIs because then you are not developing for the open web. >>> At least not right now in the short term. >>> >>> On the other hand, we have plenty of presentation material and >>> documentation that says ‘Use our WebAPIs with which you can make your web >>> applications do the same awesome things that other (native) platforms >>> offer’. So that is the opposite. >>> >>> Personally I don’t think neither proposition is bad, and I think we need >>> the second to arrive at the open web. It is just not going to happen >>> overnight. So I think it is really important to not drive people in a >>> specific way of developing apps at this point. >> I really hope that our dev evangelists are not saying that, but rather >> "make use of our new APIs and degrade gracefully when they are not >> available". If this is not the message, we have a problem. >> >> > > I was going to say this, thanks Fabrice. > > On the Open Web we always do graceful degradation (or progressive > enhancement), and using our Web API should not be different, except for > very specific apps. It might even make sense to implement/facilitate the creation of polyfills for those platforms where some of those calls aren't ready yet (e.g. getUserMedia for webcam input, etc.) --da _______________________________________________ dev-webapps mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-webapps _______________________________________________ dev-webapps mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-webapps
