Somehow applications running on a single machine (classical desktop apps) cannot be the same class of patterns as a browser-webserver combo where two different

Somehow applications running on a single machine (classical desktop apps) cannot be the same class of patterns as a browser-webserver combo where two different machines may persist different pieces of data, respond to different types of events etc. The browser receives human user input and displays model information. For the web server the "user" is the browser. Effectively you might want to start with an abstract stacked MVC-MVC pattern and see if anything is actually redundant. I dont think clearing those things up is an academic pursuit. The confusion about those patterns is an important data point about the quality and accuracy of our communication about architectural designs. If you thing of the MVC discussion as a sort of metacode, its full of metabugs.