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

Re: Broadband applications

Author:Gary Teter
Posted:3/2/1999; 10:14:34 AM
Topic:Snappy!
Msg #:3466 (In response to 3461)
Prev/Next:3465 / 3467

"First huge breakthrough - get rid of pages!"

I agree! It's time that web sites worked like regular applications. Let's think of them as applications -- or better yet, experiences -- not sites.

"IE5 allows us to build true applications with memory and cache control, XSL object orientation, etc."

That's great! However, it's been possible before that -- I was dismayed to find that your broadband example requires IE5. One of my goals as a developer is to have my application available to as many people as possible; that's why I work on the web.

We've been working for the last year on the World Wide School, a site that aims to provide a free education to whoever wants it. The courses -- still very much in beta -- are designed to work like a CD-ROM application; there's a save button, submitting a form doesn't necessarily cause the page to reload, courses have DHTML animations, draggables remember their positions from session to session, etc. The only requirement is a version 4 browser, either Netscape or Internet Explorer.

This stuff is hard! I look forward to the day when there's a consistent DOM between browsers, when client-side Java really is write-once-run-anywhere, when things like XML-RPC eliminate the complex workarounds we've spent a year developing. Actually, we completed the JavaScript playback engine six months ago, and we've spent the last six months patching one browser incompatibility after another.

(For example, recently we decided we're going to have to get rid of Java on the client side -- we have a nifty, simple, Java applet that lived in a hidden frame and sent key/value pairings off to the WebObjects application, as directed by JavaScript. Sweet! But it turns out the JVMs are too unreliable; we couldn't guarantee that the applet would load and start properly on every machine. So we're going back to stuffing answers into a form in a hidden frame, and submitting that.)

There's nothing particularly broadband about the courses yet -- that's going to come later. I agree one hundred thousand percent about what broadband will really bring: streaming video and audio, and shared immersive realities like we've yet to imagine. We're working on that stuff for the World Wide School, but we've held off on releasing it even in beta form because of bandwidth limitations on the client side and problems with the scriptability of video and audio plug-ins.

PS: Shameless plug, but it's for a good cause: The sponsors of the World Wide School would definitely want me to point out that they're always looking for people who want to sponsor courses and help provide content!

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:48:18 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.