Tim Bray On the Future of the Web 46
snitch writes "In a recent interview at QCon SF 2008, Tim Bray talks about why he is not convinced with the buzz surrounding Rich Internet Applications and shares his ideas on Cloud Computing. He also expresses his opinion regarding the debate REST vs. WS-* and the future directions web technologies will be taking. Bray also addresses the way web technologies are affected by the current economic turmoil and gives his insight into which paradigms he sees going forward in these challenging times."
Let me Google that for you (Score:4, Informative)
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The article itself is a perfect example of what can go wrong when you use javascript, etc., inappropriately. They make you look at the article through a keyhole, and you can't make the keyhole bigger. The answers are also hidden behind these little plus-sign icons, which you have to click on. Hmm...so much for access for people with disabilities. Here's the full text in -- ahem -- html.
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Hi my name is Dionysios Synodinos and we are here at QCon San Francisco with Tim Bray from Sun Microsystems, to talk about the Future of the Web. Mister Bray with all the buzz about Rich Internet Applications there are many that believe that the future of the Web is synonymous to RIA technologies. What do you think of the RIA notion in general?
So when people talk about Rich Internet Applications unfortunately what they seem to usually mean is like Flash. Things that respond to key strokes and wiggle and morph and have video and move around, and they say that we need these things because the web needs to be more responsive, and more immersive and more reactive, and I am generally speaking massively unconvinced. I am old enough to remember before the web when everybody spent all day every day dealing with reactive immersive response compelled applications usually written in Visual Basic or Motif or something like that and mostly really bad. Because designing user interfaces is a hard thing and most of them aren't done well and most of them are bad.
When the web came along people shriked with glee and universally abandoned all those rich immersive responsive pre-internet applications and ran into the arms of the web. I can remember like yesterday content management conference that was held sometimes in the middle late nineties and it was a woman from a large manufacturing company talking about the content management for the technical documentation, which was a pretty big project, and she said "Oh it was so great when the vendors all brought in the web interfaces because it forced them to get rid of all these weird cascading menus and options that nobody ever used, and brutally simplified everything down" and at the end of the day the interface the browser presents is something that people are comfortable with. Over the years since then I have regularly and steadily heard them saying: "We need something that is more immersive, more responsive, more interactive".
Every time without exception that somebody said that to me, they have either been a developer or a vendor who wants to sell the technology that is immersive or responsive, or something like that. I have not once in all those years heard an ordinary user say "Oh I wish we go back to before the days of the web when every application was different and idiosyncratic ... ". On the other hand richness is a good thing but I would rather take an old fashioned point of view and if you look at the world's most popular actual real Internet applications you'll see things like Google and Facebook and Wikipedia, and so on kind of which I play all day web applications, and they are rich all right, they are rich because they expose you to lots of deep high quality content and allow you to communicate with interesting people and I think a dollar with that kind of richness is worth a thousand dollars of things that wiggle when you put the mouse over them So I tend to be highly cynical about this whole subject.
To the extend that web applications need to become richer, do you think Ajax is the horse to bet on? Also do you think that web browser is sufficiently interactive to facilitate highly engaging user experience?
Regarding the answer to the last question, the answer to this one will be fairly obvious. Yes, I mean Ajax is getting awfully good in particular with the advances that are being made in the browser technology with the increased compatibility between things like Firefox and Safari and so on and the new canvas element and the fact that the new browsers have these fantastically high performance JavaScript engines in them. I s