Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: A better web app client!

Author:Ian Beatty
Posted:12/12/1998; 12:54:21 PM
Topic:What if there were a third browser?
Msg #:1130 (In response to 1112)
Prev/Next:1129 / 1131

> Ian, are you looking forward to a post HTML4 solution with better forms and tables (not for layout) from the W3C?

My thinking isn't that specific. Standards better-designed for web-apping would be a big help. Short of that, however, browsers could have more convenient interfaces for the current standards, recognizing how they are being stretched to meet people's needs. Dave's example of better text-editing in forms comes to mind again.

On this general topic, I just read with interest webreview.com's review of IE5 that Dave pointed to in Scripting News:

http://webreview.com/wr/pub/98/12/11/feature/index.html

Microsoft seems to be going after web apps in a big way. This could be exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. I'd love to see a running sample of the kinds of interface behaviors this allows.

I do, however, worry about writing apps dependent on proprietary, Microsoft-only technologies. This smells of the Microsoft "Embrace and Extend" strategy.

Back to standards: are we ever likely to see a beyond-HTML standard developed for web app interfaces and web app client-server communication? (Maybe an XML-RPC standard for the communication part?)

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:46:29 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.