Re: Newbie FAQ #2: Where's the GUI?

On Apr 1, 7:00 pm, vanekl <va...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Jonathan Gardner wrote:
On Apr 1, 12:29 pm, vanekl <va...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Where's the GUI?
the DOM is the new GUI.

As a guy who writes web apps for a living, I am hoping and praying
that you aren't right.

Life would really, really, really suck if all we had was HTML and
javascript.

MS isn't dropping another 100 mill upgrading their browser
just because they feel they got this sudden urge to become
standards compliant. More is at stake than that.


I happen to believe that we write web apps today only to satisfy
Windows users. See, Windows is so insecure you can't download and run
software on your computer. There is no jail, no security measures in
place to keep applications from messing with each other and with the
OS.

People feel comfortable running webapps because they seem to be more
secure. But I know enough to say that they aren't secure, even with
Firefox. They can't be made secure without the same measures it would
take to make the OS secure.

Firefox may be a better OS than Windows, but it is certainly lacking
compared to what I know about Linux.

Soon, it will no longer be the case that the majority of users are
running Windows. When people get onto a decent platform with a decent
security model, we'll all download and run apps without thinking about
the security implications. It won't be possible for joe user to run
any application that can destroy his machine or even hurt another app,
no matter how hard he tries.

(Using Windows, it drives me nuts that I have to get admin permission
to install stupid programs. What in the world do they need permissions
to mess with my OS for? I just want to put songs on to my iPod,
dammit.)

But more importantly, webapps are terribly restrictive. You can only
do certain things, and you can't do those things well. Some of the
ideas that webapps have forced onto us are good---throwbacks to the
days of thin clients. But as an author of many webapps, I can't tell
you how many times I have run into the limitations of the webapps--
even with AJAX or what-have-you. They simply are not enough to get the
job done. Some things, yes. But never everything, and I'm always
sacrificing the user experience to fit the model of web app
programming. This is not right. It's not the future of software.

If you want something to pray about, pray that Mozilla comes
out of round 3 of the browser wars intact.


Someday everyone will wake up and wonder why web browsers are running
web apps when those same apps run on your desktop at a million times
the speed with a million times more features and a million times the
simplicity.

One day, you'll have a document reader that reads any document
anywhere on the internet with cross-referencing and you'll have a app
launcher that can find and launch any application anywhere on the
internet. The two will be different tools.

We'll look back at the 1990's and 2000's, wondering why we wasted our
time trying to do something useful on such a terribly restrictive
platform.

HTML5 or bust.

HTML5 is simply (1+ HTML4). I don't like the direction of this,
recursively speaking. Might as well write a linux emulator on Windows
and have people download that instead of building it piecemeal.

In short, I don't buy that we should all be writing web apps. Let's
write real apps.
.

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