Rant Tuesday: It's Still Like This Ten Years Later?

Okay, so work is hard.

Modern webdev is also hard. Madness, even. You'd think that coming back after 10 years the whole HTML5 thing would be a bit more civilized... after all, the last time I touched JavaScript was when Flash was in version 4, when you had to cobble together code through drop down menus. It was horrible either way.

Ten years later, Flash is now a somewhat respectable coding environment, even if some of its quirks and slowness never went away, but javascript... it looks like nobody bothered to clean the lawn and everyone kept piling on trash, and there's people pitching tents around themselves like jQuery and they keep pretending the entire coding environment is anything but a steaming pile of manure.

There's no avoiding it though - Flash is going away. Less than five years from now there'd be more people using dedicated content consumption devices than content creation devices, and nobody is hedging their bets that Microsoft is going to pull through with the likes of Windows 8. So HTML5 is as close to the new "build once deploy everywhere" environment as you can get.

Meanwhile, I've found half a dozen ways to write a helper class to load a bunch of images, with none of them looking either right or wrong.

This transition is going to take quite a while.