TitanPad shutting down
blog.titanpad.com
blog.titanpad.com
Is the web itself really changing in backwards-incompatible ways that would break a web application like TitanPad? That's disappointing if so. I wouldn't want the web to evolve in such a way as that documents need to be actively "maintained" or else risk becoming unintelligible or unusable. The value of having standards is diminished if they are continuously moving targets.
In contrast, I understand exactly why server infrastructure faces a large challenge in this area. I'm sure they built their "legacy" service on version 1.0 of something, which ran on version "X" of something else, and now that platform's major releases focus on version "Y" and beyond (and by the way, version 1.0 of something no longer builds on version "Y" of the platform), and the platform team has recently announced "X" has reached end of life and will stop receiving security updates. And so on, and so forth.
Bit rot. It happens with system software. Is it happening to the web too? I am distinguishing between the server software that renders the HTML/CSS/JS content, and the compatibility of that content to be displayed and interact correctly in browsers.
The problem comes when you start using prefixed css keys or unstable / non standard features. Since those are sort of "WIP features", it should be obvious that they need to be maintained.
Sure, a few browser vendors have played with introducing new, non-standard features in the hopes that they would become standard such as native observers and web SQL, and backed down before they were standardized. But, there's no reason to think that the HTML/CSS/JS that they're using now will stop working at anytime in the remotely near future, since the site seems to work fine on multitude of browsers now.