12 ms·

"...and the WHAT-WG has been busily standardizing, all of these things for quite a number of years now." Quite a number of years too long. Let's take drag-and

by Qz 17y ago

"...and the WHAT-WG has been busily standardizing, all of these things for quite a number of years now." Quite a number of years too long. Let's take drag-and-drop -- how long has that been around? Decades? And it's only now that we can drag and drop attachments into emails in a handful of webmail clients? That's not innovation, it's playing a really slow game of catchup. I agree that 'browsers are innovating' -- but it's at a snail's pace at best.

sjs 17y ago
I guess it depends on your frame of view. Web apps have advantages over traditional desktop software, such as no installation required and upgrades by hitting refresh. Don't underestimate the power of users being able to just try your app by surfing to a URL, and "installing" it by remembering the URL (which the browser does for you), or bookmarking it. Some browers now automatically populate a home page with your most commonly used apps/sites. If you think about it Google is like a big web app store. Version Tracker and all are great, as are traditional package managers, but they still can't match the UX of web apps in that area. They are just different, each with their strengths and weaknesses. It seems like it's going to be easier and quicker to get web apps on feature parity with desktop apps before the desktop catches up in the ways it is behind.
- Qz 17y ago
  Web Apps do have advantages over traditional desktop software -- what I'm trying to get at is that we can take what we've learned about web apps, and apply that knowledge to 'traditional' software to get desktop apps that don't suck. It doesn't have to be about web apps vs desktop apps, or one catching up with the other. Within a few years I don't think there will even be a concept of desktop vs web apps, not because one killed the other, but because they will have been integrated. > Some browers now automatically populate a home page with your most commonly used apps/sites. This is exactly what I mean. Now? This could have been done years ago. Don't even get me started on the bookmarks system (offline and online both). There are innovative things that can be done with these simple aspects of web interaction that could have been done years back -- it's not like there's some miracle tech that is making new stuff possible. UI designers as a group (or maybe more fairly, the companies that employ them) have, in my opinion, been inexcusably lazy in regards to pushing forward the computer user experience.
mbrubeck 17y ago
Imitating desktop platforms has never been the strong point of web sites and web browsers. If you think of the web platform in terms of how good it is at building desktop applications, then you will see many valid weaknesses, but you will completely miss many important strengths. Clay Shirky makes this point better than I can: http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html Browsers have been innovating, just not where you might be looking. One type of innovation that's totally invisible from a "competing with native apps" viewpoint but really useful in terms of the web's strengths is Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). CORS has been a draft spec for a while and is now implemented by most major browsers. With CORS and other standards it's influenced (like WebSockets), a web page can send and receive data to multiple sites while still remaining in the browser's same-origin sandbox (which means users don't need to trust it any more than a regular web page). That security sandbox is a unique strength of the web; average desktop users still need to trust every application developer with complete access of their computer. This is an area where native platforms are playing catch-up to the web - iPhone and Android have finally brought this level of sandboxing to mainstream operating systems, a decade after it evolved in web browsers.
- Qz 17y ago
  It's not about imitating a desktop application, but about having a usable interface with one. For example: Let's say I'm one of those wackos who keeps a zillion files on my desktop. I want to upload a picture to imageshack or whatever. The way we've been forced to do this for years now is to click the browse button on the webpage, navigate to the desktop folder,and finally scroll down through a zillion files to find the one image I want to upload. Or, you could just drag the image file from the desktop to the imageshack page and it would Just Work. I realize there are apps that let you do this kind of drag and drop uploading, but that's exactly the point -- apps did this easily, so there really was absolutely no reason for it to take years for drag and drop to finally make it into HTML. Thinking in terms of desktop vs mobile is narrow-sighted. What's at stake here is pushing forward the browser (aka: web) interaction experience, regardless of platform.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago

by Qz 17y ago

sjs 17y ago

I guess it depends on your frame of view. Web apps have advantages over traditional desktop software, such as no installation required and upgrades by hitting refresh. Don't underestimate the power of users being able to just try your app by surfing to a URL, and "installing" it by remembering the URL (which the browser does for you), or bookmarking it. Some browers now automatically populate a home page with your most commonly used apps/sites. If you think about it Google is like a big web app store. Version Tracker and all are great, as are traditional package managers, but they still can't match the UX of web apps in that area. They are just different, each with their strengths and weaknesses. It seems like it's going to be easier and quicker to get web apps on feature parity with desktop apps before the desktop catches up in the ways it is behind.

Qz 17y ago
Web Apps do have advantages over traditional desktop software -- what I'm trying to get at is that we can take what we've learned about web apps, and apply that knowledge to 'traditional' software to get desktop apps that don't suck. It doesn't have to be about web apps vs desktop apps, or one catching up with the other. Within a few years I don't think there will even be a concept of desktop vs web apps, not because one killed the other, but because they will have been integrated. > Some browers now automatically populate a home page with your most commonly used apps/sites. This is exactly what I mean. Now? This could have been done years ago. Don't even get me started on the bookmarks system (offline and online both). There are innovative things that can be done with these simple aspects of web interaction that could have been done years back -- it's not like there's some miracle tech that is making new stuff possible. UI designers as a group (or maybe more fairly, the companies that employ them) have, in my opinion, been inexcusably lazy in regards to pushing forward the computer user experience.

mbrubeck 17y ago

Imitating desktop platforms has never been the strong point of web sites and web browsers. If you think of the web platform in terms of how good it is at building desktop applications, then you will see many valid weaknesses, but you will completely miss many important strengths. Clay Shirky makes this point better than I can: http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html Browsers have been innovating, just not where you might be looking. One type of innovation that's totally invisible from a "competing with native apps" viewpoint but really useful in terms of the web's strengths is Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS). CORS has been a draft spec for a while and is now implemented by most major browsers. With CORS and other standards it's influenced (like WebSockets), a web page can send and receive data to multiple sites while still remaining in the browser's same-origin sandbox (which means users don't need to trust it any more than a regular web page). That security sandbox is a unique strength of the web; average desktop users still need to trust every application developer with complete access of their computer. This is an area where native platforms are playing catch-up to the web - iPhone and Android have finally brought this level of sandboxing to mainstream operating systems, a decade after it evolved in web browsers.

Qz 17y ago
It's not about imitating a desktop application, but about having a usable interface with one. For example: Let's say I'm one of those wackos who keeps a zillion files on my desktop. I want to upload a picture to imageshack or whatever. The way we've been forced to do this for years now is to click the browse button on the webpage, navigate to the desktop folder,and finally scroll down through a zillion files to find the one image I want to upload. Or, you could just drag the image file from the desktop to the imageshack page and it would Just Work. I realize there are apps that let you do this kind of drag and drop uploading, but that's exactly the point -- apps did this easily, so there really was absolutely no reason for it to take years for drag and drop to finally make it into HTML. Thinking in terms of desktop vs mobile is narrow-sighted. What's at stake here is pushing forward the browser (aka: web) interaction experience, regardless of platform.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago