W3C Widgets: The good, the bad and the ugly

It hasn’t been a while since ppk wrote about totally a new W3C movement called “Widgets“. A Widget is a downloadable archive of HTML, JavaScript, CSS and a configuration file. It’s a downloadable web front-end. Basically it’s designed to build mobile apps to avoid extra network usage consumed to download heavy weight pages, CSS and JS. With Widgets, you only consume network traffic for data transmission. Before getting into details I have to share a fact that according to my knowledge, Opera Mobile is the only browser around with Widgets support.

You can read Vodafone’s tutorial to make a Widget first to have an initial look.

The Good

For many years, I’ve been in a huge debate with people who uses work force inefficiently by their 35k different platforms and SDKs. Half of the developer have written HTML once in their life and JavaScript has a very large developers base. Every new mobile platform is usually re-inventing the wheel once again and this default action is usually driven by business fears.

Widgets make software accessible anywhere you can run a browser. It’s definitely “Write once, run everywhere”. And the complaints about slow page transmission is being fixed by running them from local resources.

Widgets will push mobile web browsers to act more similarly as applications base grow. Many of the extensions such as geo-location APIs dont really fit each other and some mobile browsers provide totally non-standard features. If web applications dominates the mobile, community will push browsers to act better.

It’s easy to get in. You dont have to download SDKs, learn another language and read documentation/tutorials to learn something new.

The Bad

Performance. Native apps run fast. Even Dalvik empowered Android is horrible and not really responsive compared to other platforms’ applications because of Java. Heavy JS on web browsers are not scalable and just like most of the other browsers, Safari on iPhone has rendering issues even on local websites.

Forget the advantages of Web when it comes to releasing software. No on the fly updates at all. Software should be downloaded again and again as new versions release.  Accessibility to internal platform is questionable. Open platforms like Android provide access to internals such as contact lists, file system and invoking other applications. If mobile  operating system manufacturers cant meet at providing the similar APIs, this wont work.

The Ugly

I find the old-generation of mobile development community is very ill-minded. They use the know-how to make money and this community is interested in their complex and closed environments.

On the other hand, the only contributor is Opera for now. I’m not really sure if they go for larger market share or not. If an open standard acts like a diverse platform for Opera browser phones, it’s the same story.