In the early days of the web whenever you saw something neat and wanted to learn how they did it, all you had to do was right-click and select view source. Then you’d open your own page and try to apply what you saw. I’m sure I’m not the only one who used this method to learn HTML.
Of course, this was the early days of the web and there really wasn’t much to webpages. The epiphanies of the day were “oh, that’s how you change the color of the font,” or “Wow! The blink tag is so cool.”
As the web evolved, the pages themselves became more complex. Javascript enabled developers to manipulate the page programmatically. Presentation was separated from layout by CSS. A complex DHTML page probably had dozens of libraries and bizarre newlines inserted by the server templating language. It was all text and probably built on open-standards, but it was a little obfuscated. However, with enough time and patience, you could figure out what was going on.
This changed drastically with the next-generation of rich-technologies. With Flash, and most of its competitors that sprang up later, all you got was a binary. The best examples are in the real world. The web got richer, but the cost was developers had to search high and low to make something useful. They could no longer learn from something that worked.
The trade-off between functionality and the ability to learn by example was the status quo — until the advent of rich client technologies that use DOM extensions and better browsers. For example, when you view the source of an Appcelerator page, instead of bizarre hieroglyphics, you see things like on="l:fade.me then effect[fade]". What makes this great is that you get a lot of the rich interface, the framework abstracts the browser-specific work, and source is less obfuscated than it was in the early days of DHTML. It’s a triple win. The web is open, no rosetta stones required.
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