About once a month, I dwell on this. Modern web pages can easily be 20MB. You can do a lot in 20 megs. Re-reading Apple’s “Thoughts on Flash” tonight, I was su

About once a month, I dwell on this. Modern web pages can easily be 20MB. You can do a lot in 20 megs. Re-reading Apple’s “Thoughts on Flash” tonight, I was surprised at how many times Apple mentioned vendor lock-in. JavaScript is definitely here to stay. Ten years later, though, I wonder if we have ended up in nearly the same place we strived to avoid - high power consumption - but with worse authoring tools. But with at least open standards, which are good. I figure the magic moment will occur when some tiny startup builds friendly authoring tools on top of a tight runtime à la Decker. Like HyperCard/Director/Flash it’ll only get you 66% there, but that will be enough for many folks. Hackers. Hobbyists. Students. Tiny companies, and guerrilla departments. The challenges will be preventing feature-itis, keeping it embeddable / avoiding JS library dependencies, and making it at least free-as-in-beer with an open format. I know there’s space for such a thing. My money’s on some lean 5-person startup with strong opinions. Decker: https://beyondloom.com/decker/index.html https://beyondloom.com/decker/index.html