This is a good point. I'm not opposed to using HTML in an app. Back in the early 00's, I did a decent bit of tweaking my Adium conversation display style. It's useful for displaying that kind of content easily.
But there's a difference between saying "I put a webview in my app" and "I put my whole app in a webview". Driving the whole thing from HTML/JS tends to have bad implications for:
• Performance (laggy animation, excessive CPU use, more drain on battery)
• Window management (everything in one box! Modal overlays! Window management is overrated, nobody uses Exposé or multiple windows of one app anyway)
• and UI consistency (some popup menus look one way, right click and every other popup menu on the computer looks another way)
Adium, Textual, and Colloquy use HTML to display things, but they don't try and shove the whole damn app in it.
wlesieutre|10 years ago
But there's a difference between saying "I put a webview in my app" and "I put my whole app in a webview". Driving the whole thing from HTML/JS tends to have bad implications for:
• Performance (laggy animation, excessive CPU use, more drain on battery)
• Window management (everything in one box! Modal overlays! Window management is overrated, nobody uses Exposé or multiple windows of one app anyway)
• and UI consistency (some popup menus look one way, right click and every other popup menu on the computer looks another way)
Adium, Textual, and Colloquy use HTML to display things, but they don't try and shove the whole damn app in it.
hobarrera|10 years ago
Every app has to re-invent the wheel here, and there's a lot of native controls that don't exist on HTML.
Generally though, window management is unimportant because these apps tend to be single-windowed apps anyway.