[keyist]

There is a direct analogy to creative writing.

The publishing equivalent of Apple would have stifled e.e. cummings for his abuse of punctuation. You wouldn't have Jabberwocky because it contained imaginary words. You wouldn't have Joyce because the App^H^H^HBook Store reviewers decided that it made absolutely no sense.

The examples above are all of writers tinkering with English, tinkering with writing, hacking the language to accomplish things that otherwise would have been impossible before. A closed system takes all these away.

You shouldn't dismiss the effect of walled gardens on hackers just because you can't or won't empathize with our bit-twiddling.

[rinich]

Bullshit. If somebody broke UI rules in as brilliant a way as Cummings did it, Apple would accept the app. Meanwhile, publishing companies reject poets with shitty punctuation every day. The fact that Cummings was published has a lot to do with the fact that his punctuation was awesome. (Also, Cummings wrote more typical sonnets before he started experimenting, so there was precedent.)

If you want to be experimental, be it online. Nobody can deny access to your HTML5 creations. In fact, Apple's one of the biggest pushers of compliant modern web browsing.