Widgets Re: ISSUE-237 (Define Mobile Web Applications)

On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:22:06 +0100, Jeff Sonstein <jeffs@it.rit.edu> wrote:

> On Feb 23, 2008, at 10:18 AM, public-bpwg@w3.org wrote:
>
>> All of these things are capable of consuming data expressed in HTML and  
>> javascript.
>
> that seems to me to be the key point...
> data expressed as HTML or some XML variant
> and using W3C technologies for dealing w that data
> include DOM (data model)
> and CSS (view) and
> Javascript/ECMAScript (controller)
>
> one of the exciting thing about
> "webapps" and "widgets"
> to my students
> is that the two both use
> the same technologies as generic Web pages...
> they just use them in different run-time contexts
> so they (the students) can apply the same knowledge
> to building within both run-time contexts now...
> on the desk-/palm-top or within the browser
>
> one of the exciting things about
> "webapps" and "widgets"
> to me as a teacher
> is the zillions of people who
> already know how to build them
> (and just do not realize that yet)

By Widgets, I mean the things that are slowly being standardised in the  
W3C Web App Formats group - web pages with a bit of packaging, that are  
designed to run as applications everywhere. At the moment nearly all of  
them run in one kind of browser or another, and we are working towards  
making a packaging  standard so they can be run in all different kinds of  
browsers just like the web application they are built on.

As Jeff says, the point of these widgets is that millions of people  
already know how to make web applications. The widget bit is ust a thin  
packaging layer so that you don't have to shop the entire application to  
the client each time you want to use it (and in itself would almost  
certainly be a best practice if we had decent interoperability. So for  
widget platform developers who are not Nokia, Opera, or people reading and  
working on standardising the packagin, maybe it would be helpful to follow  
that work too. The major pain for authors at the moment is that you have  
to write for one platform or another, or do something complicated that  
allows you to ship multiple slightly-different versions of the very same  
content (a bit like the shenanigans you have to go through to deal with  
the fact that IE still doesn't support XHTML as XML).

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals   Try Opera 9.5: http://snapshot.opera.com

Received on Sunday, 24 February 2008 15:04:42 UTC