Papers From W3C Web Apps Workshop Available

cying writes "Position papers from the W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents are now available. The workshop will discuss the W3C's future roadmap for web application standards. Many weighed in, including Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation, Sun, and several mobile companies (including mine)."

Hack built upon hack

[bay43270]

The term 'web application' in my opinion smells of a hack. We took a nice little text markup language and added a handful of basic UI components, a few scripting languages, CGI, server side content generation engines and standard after standard layered upon each other to try to re-create a user experience that already existed in 1984. The entire reason we choose to make web applications over 'thick client applications' is because of deployment issues. Why don't we just work to make our thick applications more easily distributed instead?

Re:Hack built upon hack

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there are other advantages:

• Security: I might trust a web application (like Google) to provide me with search results, but not necessarily with all the content on my hard drive.
• Access to information: Local apps might need to access information stored in a central repository. Would it make sense to have Google or Slashdot running as a local application?

It could certainly be argued that HTML and HTTP need changes, and perhaps a rewrite (although I doubt a rewrite will happen in the next 10-20 years). There are also undoubtedly many web applications that are written as hacks. But I don't think a hosted application accessible from a browser is a hack.

On an unrelated note, I do question the W3C getting seriously involved in what appear to be server-side issues. I would personally prefer the W3C focus on clientserver standards. There are already plenty of server-side standards (servlets, Perl CGI, etc.) for applications. And the client need not be aware of them.

Re:Hack built upon hack

[bay43270]

I would like to point out that I didn't mean to put down HTML or HTTP. HTML is a great way to display and link documents. I don't have any problems with HTTP either (although, knowing what we know today, we could make improvements). I also wasn't trying to condemn applications that communicate to a centralized server for content or even processing capabilities. I'm just saying that I don't believe any amount of hacking is going to allow HTML to provide the user experience we ultimately want it to have. Even if we could, the resulting code would be an un-maintainable mess.

We've had perfectly good frameworks for creating rich GUI applications for years (rich UI features with much more maintainable code). We just don't use them for much because we can't get more than a few thousand people to install an application unless it's *really* important to them. I'd write more, but then I'd end up with a term paper about how/why other attempts have failed (applets, activeX, webstart) and pro/cons of solutions in the works today (Avalon, standard flash components).

Re:Hack built upon hack

[ron_ivi]

I do question the W3C getting seriously involved in what appear to be server-side issues.

The original DARPA grant that started the W3C also included a MIT project [mit.edu] that proposed what is a very nice solution [mit.edu] for distributing rich applications through a HTML-like content language.

Alas some company [slashdot.org] got involved and practically killed this technology, but before their bizzare licensing policies kill it completely you can check out some really cool demos [curl.com] this technology enables.

You mean like XUL and Nexaweb?

[sproketboy]

http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/javatools/jssta ndard/reference/techart/nexaweb.html

Microsoft's position paper

[hiroko]

Sounds like the typical Microsoft approach: "we're gonna ignore the topic, and tell you how wonderful our stuff is".

Reminds me of a MS rep at an OSS day, trying to hype their interoperability - using TCP as an example. Muppet.

Re:Microsoft's position paper

[bay43270]

Sounds like the typical Microsoft approach: "we're gonna ignore the topic, and tell you how wonderful our stuff is".

I don't' think their ignoring the issue. They just don't agree that we should be looking for a declarative solution (and I couldn't agree more):

We wish to present [snip-marketing crap] some experiences on the feasibility of standardization of procedural programming models (in contrast to declarative document formats).

They are suggesting we abandon the idea of using declarative markup for web applications and use real programming languages. I seriously doubt they were suggesting they would share Avalon, so I can only assume they were trying to convince us to create a parallel standard. This isn't that different than the approach XUL takes (MS just uses binary code rather than ECMA-script for the logic).