Zuckerberg's harsh words are a mixed blessing for HTML5. Some people will get the wrong message and just dismiss HTML5 altogether, which isn't what he said. His main point is he regrets building native apps with HTML5, and with the benefit of hindsight, he is right.
The good thing about this is the browsers and standards people need a wake-up call. See the comments in Paul Irish's recent thread about this [1].
There are people who are content to plod along and debate the finer points of one attribute or another, while native APIs are steaming ahead. Quotes like "We burned two years" and "Betting completely on HTML5 was the biggest strategic mistake Facebook made" from Facebook's CEO are the kind of evidence that should get people to wake up and smell the coffee, if they still haven't done so.
I agree, but feel that with Facebook's resources there was nothing stopping them from building a native application and a counterpart web application much like Twitter. Using a friend's device? Opt for the web interface. Using your own device? Native install.
These things can live in harmony, not exclusivity.
But, the Facebook philosophy has always been, of hacking together what works today and think about other things later. HTML5 allows rapid fluid UI(as in feed based UI) development. The native app would have taken atleast 4-6 months for a barely tested app( As an Android Developer, I can vouch for that). They got the HTML5 app running in much less time. Having a lot of resources doesn't mean better quality work. More often than not, small teams are deliberately allotted such tasks to maintain homogeneity in design and code architecture. A mobile app is special type of software where the UI is very close to the other components(i.e Event Handling, Models etc.). Putting a large number of developers on it won't make it go any faster. Think of that scenario: 200 people working on a mobile app, pumping out features and testing sequentially!!How would that even work?
I think you misunderstood my point. Facebook has the resources to have a mobile and native app developed concurrently. I did not mean throwing more developers at a problem to get it completed faster.
In my opinion he was just issuing blanket statements to warm the cold reality that Facebook doesn't care about quality.
the Facebook philosophy has always been, of hacking together what works today and think about other things later.
If this was really the case, why wouldn't he just say, "hey, it was just our first draft" or something similar, rather than blaming an entire technology?
You do realize that the "standards people" are just Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera, and Apple employees, right?
What you'll find amazing when you read W3C mailing lists is only a tiny minority of those people invited to participate actual work on apps that are used by end users.
Standards people today are, almost across the board, completely detached from product people.
From the developer perspective, who wants to sit on mailing lists or participate in forums and argue about wording and syntax verbiage?
From the 'standard people' perspective, writing the code is 'the easy part', and getting all these competing interests (ie: other standards people) to agree on something is the 'hard part'.
I wish standards people spent all of their time on mailing lists, things would happen faster. These are the people who write code for browsers, for the most part. We also need people who are working on websites to be in there and it seems like web devs are underrepresented.
The good thing about this is the browsers and standards people need a wake-up call. See the comments in Paul Irish's recent thread about this [1].
There are people who are content to plod along and debate the finer points of one attribute or another, while native APIs are steaming ahead. Quotes like "We burned two years" and "Betting completely on HTML5 was the biggest strategic mistake Facebook made" from Facebook's CEO are the kind of evidence that should get people to wake up and smell the coffee, if they still haven't done so.
1. https://plus.google.com/113127438179392830442/posts/fR3iiuN4...