Re: Spolsky's requests for Web Applications

>Before we move on, Joel requested REST like APIs.  I assume other
>people will want SOAP. Both are interesting and useful.  What do
>people think?

SOAP is easily implementable on top of the more basic controls, I wouldn't
increase the implementation complexity, when SOAP isn't much used when you
control both ends of the system.

>- Which widget set would you pick? (eg. XUL, Swing, Cocoa, WinFX, ...)
>  Does it matter? Invent your own?

I don't want a widget set much, web UI's work if they follow web
conventions, unless you're going to be able to use full native OS behaviour
which I think is too big a job to standardise, and make work interopably in
platform independant apps, I'd love to be proved wrong, but I just don't see
it.

>> 9. Graceful degradation for legacy browsers (IE. It's time to make
>>    Microsoft play catchup again. Fire and Motion Baby.)

I think this is completely pointless, for the current web-applications, we
can knock them up in IE easily enough, but there's no motivation to author
something that degrades to IE, since it'll be sub-optimal in your most
important platform, I could only convince people of the merits migration to
a new development system if it was a large improvement, and there were
things we couldn't realisitically do in IE, or the total cost of development
and convincing the clients to use the new UA's was substantially lower.  I
think that would take a long time though, since there won't be the tools or
the experienced developers available to get it going, the IE DHTML solution
will win out for a long time.

As you note the mobile space is a different game, we have different
priorities, and different mechanics in forcing upgrade decisions, and
different applications, they generally don't want to interop with IE.
Here's where we can move away from the HTML world I think, and where there
is value in a spec (not that it would be mobile specific, just that, that's
where I think users for it can be found)  I can't imagine using anything but
HTML+CSS+JS for mass market desktop clients in the next few years.  Other
than for areas where particular other strengths offered by Flash, SVG,
video+SMIL etc. exist.

Jim.

Received on Saturday, 26 June 2004 05:49:50 UTC