Re: complexity

> Why? I've yet to see evidence that there is a need for any of those in
> particular on the *Web*.  There have been offhanded mentions of doing a

But the "web" is primarily a marketing tool these days, and is therefore
about "wants", not "needs".  Those are what are driving current demands
on browsers.  (Your position may be true of the web without quotes, but very
few sites are extensively webbed to other sites these days - e.g. searching
for consumer products, I expect to have to do a completely separate 
search of the manufacturer site (if I can work out who they are) to 
get the product manual.)
 
> You're stuck on that term.  IMHO a semantic XHTML document styled with a bit
> of CSS for a mostly static and somewhat interactive presentation is *not* an
> application.  It's a document.  There's a lot of value in documents.  Even
> TBL makes the distinction on his personal web page [1].

The money is associated with creating "user experiences" which is about
applications, not about documents.  (As a user I would much rather have
the document, rather than the experience, and generally seek out the
PDF files[1] on a site - e.g. for technical products, I look for the
user manual and ignore the feature list in the HTML.)

> >> *Try turning off scripting support in your favorite browser and browsing
> >> typical sites.  You'll find that most sites work just fine with scripting

I find that most, particularly big company, commercial sites are blank or
all links loop to the current page or are not presented as links at all
(onclick with or without href="#"); currently I've also had ones that
have pulldown lists that are empty without scripting and/or cannot be
submitted without scripting.  We're talking about the major global
consumer electronics companies, amongst others.

[1] Although PDF is theoretically more graphical than HTML, it is not
as "cool", so the copywrites get to produce "web" pages and the document
writers get to use PDF.

Received on Tuesday, 20 April 2004 02:41:05 UTC