7 ms·

One really important reason is not to tie your intranet to the Silverlight/Flash/runtime N roadmap. Better to hook up to something that will run in browsers wi

One really important reason is not to tie your intranet to the Silverlight/Flash/runtime N roadmap. Better to hook up to something that will run in browsers without painting yourself into yet another proprietary corner.

xradionut 15y ago
Yeah, let's have a richly, wonderful, HTML interface that still can't replicate desktop GUI productivity from the 90's...
- WayneDB 15y ago
  This is exactly the problem. HTML/CSS/JS is disgusting to someone who knows the power of a good native SDK. People who only do web dev just don't know what quality is.
  - joelthelion 15y ago
    Quality is also your stuff running on anyone's computer, and not depending on a big company that has the power to kill your stuff and force you to rewrite it.
    - WayneDB 15y ago
      Sure. That's nice about HTML, but too bad you lose almost every other quality thing because of it. I don't understand why everyone is so hung up on HTML though. The internet is not HTML, the internet is TCP/IP and all the protocols that ride on it like HTTP. Why can't we just leave HTML the way it is, use it primarily for making nice documents and come up with something new for apps? You know, instead of trying to shoe-horn everything into a spec that has to cover both apps and documents or anything in-between? Why isn't there a standards committee for a kit like Silverlight or Flash? The runtime would have to be built once for each platform, but that's no different than HTML.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  I have very rich HTML+JavaScript+JSON interfaces here that make me orders of magnitude more productive than I was in the 90's, but that may be me. OTOH, you may be tied to IE6 and unable to see all this.
  - WayneDB 15y ago
    Please, show me your best HTML UI components and we will compare them to the native ones or even the Silverlight ones that are available (from Telerik, DevExpress, Infragistics, ComponentOne, etc) Can you even get a data grid that is half as powerful or has as robust an API as something like this? http://www.telerik.com/products/wpf/gridview.aspx http://www.telerik.com/products/wpf/gridview.aspx
    - frou_dh 15y ago
      It does look powerful, but the font rendering is dire. So the browser gets at least one plus.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      Can't tell. It won't run on my computer. Which is the whole point. Gmail runs on my Mac, on my Linux machines, on my OpenSolaris server (actually, it runs OpenIndiana these days) and on my tablet. It would probably run just fine on my AIX boxes if I compiled Firefox or Chromium for them. If Google abandons it (but keep the servers running) it will continue to operate on newer computers and newer browsers until Google pulls the plug.
      - xradionut 15y ago
        For a few decades people accessed email on text based terminals. There's plenty of applications with more complex UIs than email...
        rbanffy 15y ago
        I have other applications with more complicated UI's also relying on HTML and AJAX and they work just fine. What kind of web applications do you have that would require Silverlight or something similar?

xradionut 15y ago

Yeah, let's have a richly, wonderful, HTML interface that still can't replicate desktop GUI productivity from the 90's...

WayneDB 15y ago
This is exactly the problem. HTML/CSS/JS is disgusting to someone who knows the power of a good native SDK. People who only do web dev just don't know what quality is.
- joelthelion 15y ago
  Quality is also your stuff running on anyone's computer, and not depending on a big company that has the power to kill your stuff and force you to rewrite it.
  - WayneDB 15y ago
    Sure. That's nice about HTML, but too bad you lose almost every other quality thing because of it. I don't understand why everyone is so hung up on HTML though. The internet is not HTML, the internet is TCP/IP and all the protocols that ride on it like HTTP. Why can't we just leave HTML the way it is, use it primarily for making nice documents and come up with something new for apps? You know, instead of trying to shoe-horn everything into a spec that has to cover both apps and documents or anything in-between? Why isn't there a standards committee for a kit like Silverlight or Flash? The runtime would have to be built once for each platform, but that's no different than HTML.
rbanffy 15y ago
I have very rich HTML+JavaScript+JSON interfaces here that make me orders of magnitude more productive than I was in the 90's, but that may be me. OTOH, you may be tied to IE6 and unable to see all this.
- WayneDB 15y ago
  Please, show me your best HTML UI components and we will compare them to the native ones or even the Silverlight ones that are available (from Telerik, DevExpress, Infragistics, ComponentOne, etc) Can you even get a data grid that is half as powerful or has as robust an API as something like this? http://www.telerik.com/products/wpf/gridview.aspx http://www.telerik.com/products/wpf/gridview.aspx
  - frou_dh 15y ago
    It does look powerful, but the font rendering is dire. So the browser gets at least one plus.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    Can't tell. It won't run on my computer. Which is the whole point. Gmail runs on my Mac, on my Linux machines, on my OpenSolaris server (actually, it runs OpenIndiana these days) and on my tablet. It would probably run just fine on my AIX boxes if I compiled Firefox or Chromium for them. If Google abandons it (but keep the servers running) it will continue to operate on newer computers and newer browsers until Google pulls the plug.
    - xradionut 15y ago
      For a few decades people accessed email on text based terminals. There's plenty of applications with more complex UIs than email...
      - rbanffy 15y ago
        I have other applications with more complicated UI's also relying on HTML and AJAX and they work just fine. What kind of web applications do you have that would require Silverlight or something similar?