So apparently Microsoft is developing a suite of web development tools to compete with Adobe Flash, Photoshop and Illustrator. According to International Business Times, something I never thought I’d be writing on my blog, the suite is supposed to woo developers who have been turned off my Frontpage, which they’ve put out of our misery.
But, really, the best web apps I’ve ever made have been with a simple text editor and a brain full of knowledge. And some of the worst I’ve seen have been Flash or table-ridden Dreamweaver templates. If Microsoft really wanted to woo developers, they’d do better by simply making IE just followed web standards. Most of my time developing apps and designs goes into working around all of IE’s idiosyncracies bugs. And this is only because most of the people on the Internet don’t seem to think it’s more than a blue E on their desktop.
And the absolute last thing we need on the net is more freaking Flash. It’s good for two things: video and animation, and the former is only good because it makes content providers think people can’t download their content. (Horror of horrors.) Beyond that everyone should leave well enough alone and go back to HTML and Javascript/AJAX, which only gets a bad rap because IE makes it so hard to do good, standards-based programming.
Posted by: Paul in Computers
