Rahul said:
> Agreed entirely. Infact this way the user could even work offline on his
> or her laptop at various places. The upstreaming could be used as a backup too.
The converse of this statement is true too, though. What if you dont have
a laptop with you to work offline? I find myself traveling quite a bit but
rarely take my laptop with me. Why? Because I know plenty of people with
computers or can duck into a cybercafe if need be. This is exactly why I
still think attention needs to be paid to web applications that function
on a server.
When my interface to the content-creation universe is normalized I feel
happy, but if I'm using a hundred different computers in one hundred
hetrogenious environments there's no way I can guarantee that my interface
will remain consistent. *Especially* if I'm traveling overseas. This is
why I still use Pine and a number of my own tools to maintain my website,
read my email, &c.
Obviously the solution to my problem is a SOAPy world where everyone has a
broadband connection and can just download their favorite word processor
to the browser they happen to be connecting through. The only danger in
this solution is that of building apps which require heftier machines
and/or more bandwidth. I dont know *anything* about desktop app
development, so perhaps this is a misguided fear, but I worry that when we
start seeing rich applications available in some sort of
download-as-you-need-it fashion that we'll lose the emphasis on elegant
degredation. c.f. the windows java library that mucked up that attempt at
write once run anywhere.
Amongst other important lessons learned from building apps on the web:
things that work on a variety of browsers are truly cool.
cheers,
-bryan
http://bryanboyer.com | Lines and lines.
http://bryanthings.com/bits/?bit=60c0e685ed79caf8
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:18:23 PDT