Earlier today I was reading an article about Sprout Core which is billed as Cocoa for the web. The idea being that cocoa developers can use a software development approach to creating web applications. This is similar to Adobe's Flex, or Microsoft's Silverlight, but rather than generating a swf or silverlight file, it produces HTML and JavaScript.
This sounds great as you can now develop web applications that take advantage or the interoperability and open nature of web standards. However a quick look at the Sprout Core demos shatters this utopian view.
The code in the demos, reminds me of ASP.net's Visual Web Developer, where, "web developers" had no idea how to write HTML or JavaScript, and lead to some of the worst websites ever created (thetrainline anyone). The problem was a reliance on HTML for components that were written during the browser wars, that relied on Internet Explorer specific features or rendering. There was also no semantics, SEO optimisation, accessibility or use of best practices.
The most ironic problem with the Sprout Core code is the fact it doesn't work correctly on the iPhone let alone other small screen devices, it doesn't degrade well and relies on JavaScript.
I am also worried that by trying to catch up to Flex and Silverlight, Apple will start to implement draft web standards specifications for SVG and CSS, meaning Safari only versions... (till the others catch up). I have already noted that mobileMe (apparently build using Sprout Core) does not work in IE6... not even in a basic HTML version (like Gmail). To add to that the new releases of webkit have heavily updated JavaScript renders in order to cope with this new reliance on JavaScript... some of the demos crash my Firefox :0
I would be interested to see what others thing about this, and what it means for the web.