8 ms·

It is as if with the birth of the web there was a complete reboot of the IT industry The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top.

It is as if with the birth of the web there was a complete reboot of the IT industry The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top. Re-read that again and seriously think about it, because comments such as yours don't accept that simple reality. Do you contest it? Do you argue that the web somehow circumvented the competition? For 15 years I've been promoting the web with groups that I've consulted with or led. For 15 years competitors have arisen with various alternative strategies, including MFC applications, Java Applets and then Web Start solution, .NET Winforms and then .NET WPF applications, Flex and Flash applications, Silverlight applications, and on and on. And they all fell by the wayside. They lacked in features. They lacked in agility. The only competitor that has made serious inroads are native apps on mobile devices, eking out an advantage due to the unique profile and unique input techniques of those devices, and of course gaming given that the web had no interest in gaming. The web is adapting. If the advantages that you hold are true (in another post you argue that we salivate over stuff that was trivial 20 years ago. Yet ignore that we do things on the web that are just incredibly rich with but a few lines of markup and some ancillary code), those apps should have long devastated the web, teams making secure, easy to construct apps that run circles over those poor web developers.

vyrotek 14y ago
I feel the true 'reboot' and memory loss happened with native mobile apps. How did we ever think this would be a good idea? As you mentioned, the unique inputs seemed to have temporarily blinded us to real progress we've made with the web. Why can't web-based apps accept all these inputs as well? The other big problem we have is that we're stuck with this idea of having cute little icons to launch things. Why can't we have icons that just launch a specific URL? Because then App Stores wouldn't make any money then would they? Edit - Would someone care to explain their downvotes? Surely HN users wouldn't think to use a downvote to express that they just disagree, right?
- jbigelow76 14y ago
  >I feel the true 'reboot' and memory loss happened with native mobile apps. How did we ever think this would be a good idea? Native apps weren't a good idea for innovative reasons or to push boundaries of what's achievable, they were a good idea for business reasons: vendor and platform lock in.
  - npsimons 14y ago
    And yet web apps don't seem to solve vendor lockin either; see Facebook, Twitter and most recently (and poignantly) Google Reader. And before you mention that people were able to move from Google Reader to something else, you might want to consider it was because it was based on an open protocol (RSS) that wasn't tied to either native or web.
- pifflesnort 14y ago
  > Why can't we have icons that just launch a specific URL? Because then App Stores wouldn't make any money then would they? That's what iOS 1.0 did. There were no native apps, just web apps that had cute icons that launched a specific URL. People tried very hard to make that work. It didn't. The breadth and depth of mobile applications we see today only occurred once Apple provided a native SDK. The reasons for this are simply technical ones.
  - vyrotek 14y ago
    I think Palm & WebOS were on the right track by making their native apps still based on web technnologies. As far as I know there weren't any mobile inputs that those apps couldn't handle. Blaming limitations on tech seems silly. The decision was a business one. Besides that, why take away the ability to create webbased apps? Could we not have the option if I know I don't care about any of the fancy stuff. There are so many apps out there these days which are just shells of an app with a WebView inside. It feels a bit ridiculous to have to buy Apple hardware to make a shell and then use our preferred dev environment to develop the site/internals of the app.
    - demallien 14y ago
      You can just write web apps for the iPhone, even today. And yes, you can create an icon in Speongboard so that it looks just like a native app. That's how I use Google Maps on my iPhone.
    - alaskamiller 14y ago
      You're talking about 2011 storylines. There were plenty of discussions about HTML5 vs native mobile apps. Big companies like Google and Facebook extolled HTML5, partly because they needed leverage against Apple's stronghold over the dominate ecosystem. So yes, the decision was a business one to begin with. Then when reality didn't fit their agenda they've all since switched positions in 2012. Facebook rebuilding their iOS app with Obj-C, for example, to be as fast as possible. So then the decision ultimately became a technical one. Maybe it'll flip flopped around soon. We did go through a period in the 90's when CD drives came out and everyone rushed in to deliver as much multimedia content on CDs as possible before that industry died and gave way to the ubiquity of the Internet. In the future, smart phones are the CDs.
jacquesm 14y ago
Windows also 'won'. That does not make it the best solution. Merely the most successful.
- mooreds 14y ago
  What is your definition of 'best'? Unfortunately, this argument (which tends to imply technical excellence should trump all other factors in the success of a technology) has been used in technology for a long time, but frankly, in the end doesn't matter. Ask Betamax, OS/2, etc, etc.
  - yuhong 14y ago
    I have very bad words against MS on the OS/2 one: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-...
- jimbokun 14y ago
  Windows won...then lost to the web.
pifflesnort 14y ago
> The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top. It won what, exactly? The war against Gopher for presentation of hypertext documents and information display? There's more to heaven and earth than data presentation and consumption. The examples of genuinely great web applications are few and far between, if not near non-existent. Are Google Apps really the best the web has to offer? Cappuccino provided one example of how to move the browser past the shackles of the traditional HTML/JS/CSS and into a world where developers could work with more accurate abstractions that actually represented the problem domains of application development. This lesson has essentially been ignored, tossing out 3+ decades of experience our industry has in building applications.
- corresation 14y ago
  There's more to heaven and earth than data presentation and consumption. I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a browser. I get directions in a browser. I find phone numbers in a browser. I phone people in a browser. I video conference in a browser... I can go on and on all day. If you really want to argue that the web is a surrogate for Gopher, this conversation is futile.
  - pifflesnort 14y ago
    > I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a browser. I get directions in a browser. I find phone numbers in a browser. I phone people in a browser. I video conference in a browser... I'd be interested to hear how those tools stack up against their native (or cappuccino) counter-parts, because implicit in your argument is that all these attempts to extend the web into the application space are better (and have 'won') over traditional approaches to application development, which I can't say has been my experience, even for the 'best-in-breed' solutions such as Google Apps. Personally, I've found the surge of interest in native development via mobile to be invigorating, since it has meant a resurgence in applications that put user experience ahead of dogma (or even cost). I can hope that this continues to carry over to the desktop and other spheres over the next 5 years.
hackinthebochs 14y ago
It's almost as if you've drunk your own kool-aid. >And they all fell by the wayside. They lacked in features. They lacked in agility. No, no and no. The web "won" because its simple and the lowest common denominator was good enough for most people. The web has always been far behind in terms of features and agility (depending on what you're trying to optimize when it comes to agility). The web won solely because it was "open" and every company had a stake in ensuring no one company could sustain their monopoly. The web sucks and it did not win on its merits.
- imissmyjuno 14y ago
  But it has won nevertheless. The question then is what we are to do to move the web into the realm of applications. I don't have an answer, but one advantage mobile apps hold is UI standardization. There is no one right way to build an app for the web the way there is for Android or iOS. That's a problem for both the applications authors and users. Cappuccino attempted to solve that problem in a way that did not appeal to programmers, it seems. jQuery UI succeeded to a point, and now Bootstrap seems to be the framework of choice. Perhaps a widget-based UI framework that can target the desktop and mobile devices would make sense.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  Being ubiquitous is a merit.
  - npsimons 14y ago
    Which is one of the strongest selling points of Emacs and Vim. Ubiquitous doesn't equate to web based; there are plenty of native apps that are ubiquitous, and on top of that they don't require a constant network connection, or that the server is up. It also seems to me that if you have the source, you can get the software running just about anywhere.
    - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
      I don't think we disagree. It's just that on the web ubiquity is free.
particlewave 14y ago
It just happened to be that all browsers adopted HTML/CSS/JS and now we use that as an application platform (despite it being designed for sharing documents). It won because there is no other choice but it kind of still sucks which is why there is so much complaining about it.
dxbydt 14y ago
>The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top. What utter BS. You are essentially celebrating the victory of consumer commerce, not technology X over technology Y. Think about it. There never was any battle between the "Web" and "MFC, Java Applets, Webstart, .NET, Flash, Silverlight". Those thing survive & even thrive in places where nothing else would do. Do you really think everybody in investment banks & brokerages fire up their browser first thing in the morning ? 99% of what they did, do & will continue to do, will continue to be done via native apps - mostly C#, C++, .NET & Java apps. This is just plain reality. It isn't because they are lazy or don't grok the web. Processing realtime trading feeds isn't the browser's strength. Sure I'll show you an iframe with some ticker, equities blotter, trading tickets ...but that's just consumer commerce. I'm soliciting your cash - Here consumer, click on this Buy button, give me your money. After that ? Once you fire off your client request, that's when 99% of the task actually begins, and it ain't on the browser, no siree. The web is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the action is below the surface of the water, and that's not the web & will never be. To your point - the whole idea behind Webstart, Java applets, Winforms, was to mimic the native UI on the web & try to offload as much client-side logic to the client's machine. Turned out customers didn't like "fat clients" - they wanted textfields & simple input forms, accept their inputs & go away & process the inputs elsewhere. We said - Hey, you guys have a fast processor & slow network, let's do this one-time applet download/Webstart download/Silverlight app download, & once done, we won't tax your network, we'll just tax your machine. I wrote one of the first equities trading applet for Goldman Sachs. It was a fat client ~100 MB, you actually waited 10 minutes for the install. But it did so much - all the trading rules validation, portfolio construction & computation, everything happened inside that applet. Once the applet downloaded, it felt & behaved like a native desktop app. It was so much more powerful. There was actual science in that applet. It took a doen CS PhDs to build the infrastructure for shipping that. We fucking got dozens of patents...pseudo-realtime trading applet over the web ha ha ha! Today, the interface is so dumb - zero download time - but they hit the network so much harder. Absolutely nothing happens on the client. To check whether a simple trade is valid, you have to hit the server multiple times during the workflow. Customers are ok with it because the network has gotten so much faster. They were downloading ~100MB applets on 56.6k modems, now they have superfast broadband, so it makes sense to hit the server more & do less on the client box. So you just hire an 18 year old & he'll build a polished web UI for the trading applet over a weekend. That doesn't mean all those CS PhDs just up & died. They just migrated to the server side, where all the action now happens. So this isn't success of the web & failure of the applet - its success of broadband. Network penetration today is massive & ubiquitous. You can place million dollar trades over android. You couldn't do this just 10 years back. At that time, applets were state of the art. In hindsight, the whole exercise appears pointless. 100MB applets WTF, just use underscore dot js & ajax & broadband & a little bit of markup & your trading window shows up on a tiny 4 inch android cellphone. Yeah, true, but we didn't have any of that back then. Cut us a little slack, will ya.
grey-area 14y ago
I broadly agree, but I think perhaps your thesis is a bit premature given the latest push for mobile apps, and (perhaps more dangerous to the web), walled gardens like Facebook. But I think the open web will win in the end, not because of any inherent technical advantage (in some ways it's behind native apps still in terms of performance, look and feel etc), but because the open web has so many advantages for developers and users that in the end it will overcome its disadvantages. Performance and UIS are improving constantly on the web (contrary to the opinion of this poster), so the gap is narrowing. At some point the performance won't matter, offline web work will become possible, the network will be fast and ubiquitous enough and the advantages of the open web will come to the fore. As a developer of web apps and mobile apps, the contrast between deploying a few fixes a day to a website, and working hard on new app versions only to have them rejected by an anonymous gatekeeper at Apple, often for inscrutable and unjustified reasons, then waiting days or weeks for approval, could not be more marked. Things are easier on the desktop, but there are still far more hurdles to deployment, and that matters a lot, as you hint above. The only thing I really miss on the web is a great language to script web pages in, but that will come (js is not my favourite language), and you can use any language you want on the backend, and no-one need know. As a user, the advantages of the open web (i.e. not walled gardens like Facebook) will I think have an irresistible pull - advantages like linkable, shareable content, content on any device, even unforeseen ones, not having to rebuy apps but just subscribing once and accessing content from anywhere. The fact that the web is not controlled by a single vendor as most commercial operating systems or devices are is an added bonus. Finally, I'd argue that the radical simplicity of web technology is actually its greatest strength, as it means it can be deployed almost anywhere, even with limited resources, and give at least some value to users for decades and over any new devices which come out, as opposed to the binaries being created for current platforms which in a decade will be forgotten or dumped by their vendor in favour of the newest flavour of opendoc, .Net, whatever... I find it fascinating that the web delivers consistently better results by virtue of keeping the tech simple and backwards compatible. Worse is better after all.

vyrotek 14y ago

I feel the true 'reboot' and memory loss happened with native mobile apps. How did we ever think this would be a good idea? As you mentioned, the unique inputs seemed to have temporarily blinded us to real progress we've made with the web. Why can't web-based apps accept all these inputs as well? The other big problem we have is that we're stuck with this idea of having cute little icons to launch things. Why can't we have icons that just launch a specific URL? Because then App Stores wouldn't make any money then would they? Edit - Would someone care to explain their downvotes? Surely HN users wouldn't think to use a downvote to express that they just disagree, right?

jbigelow76 14y ago
>I feel the true 'reboot' and memory loss happened with native mobile apps. How did we ever think this would be a good idea? Native apps weren't a good idea for innovative reasons or to push boundaries of what's achievable, they were a good idea for business reasons: vendor and platform lock in.
- npsimons 14y ago
  And yet web apps don't seem to solve vendor lockin either; see Facebook, Twitter and most recently (and poignantly) Google Reader. And before you mention that people were able to move from Google Reader to something else, you might want to consider it was because it was based on an open protocol (RSS) that wasn't tied to either native or web.
pifflesnort 14y ago
> Why can't we have icons that just launch a specific URL? Because then App Stores wouldn't make any money then would they? That's what iOS 1.0 did. There were no native apps, just web apps that had cute icons that launched a specific URL. People tried very hard to make that work. It didn't. The breadth and depth of mobile applications we see today only occurred once Apple provided a native SDK. The reasons for this are simply technical ones.
- vyrotek 14y ago
  I think Palm & WebOS were on the right track by making their native apps still based on web technnologies. As far as I know there weren't any mobile inputs that those apps couldn't handle. Blaming limitations on tech seems silly. The decision was a business one. Besides that, why take away the ability to create webbased apps? Could we not have the option if I know I don't care about any of the fancy stuff. There are so many apps out there these days which are just shells of an app with a WebView inside. It feels a bit ridiculous to have to buy Apple hardware to make a shell and then use our preferred dev environment to develop the site/internals of the app.
  - demallien 14y ago
    You can just write web apps for the iPhone, even today. And yes, you can create an icon in Speongboard so that it looks just like a native app. That's how I use Google Maps on my iPhone.
  - alaskamiller 14y ago
    You're talking about 2011 storylines. There were plenty of discussions about HTML5 vs native mobile apps. Big companies like Google and Facebook extolled HTML5, partly because they needed leverage against Apple's stronghold over the dominate ecosystem. So yes, the decision was a business one to begin with. Then when reality didn't fit their agenda they've all since switched positions in 2012. Facebook rebuilding their iOS app with Obj-C, for example, to be as fast as possible. So then the decision ultimately became a technical one. Maybe it'll flip flopped around soon. We did go through a period in the 90's when CD drives came out and everyone rushed in to deliver as much multimedia content on CDs as possible before that industry died and gave way to the ubiquity of the Internet. In the future, smart phones are the CDs.

jacquesm 14y ago

Windows also 'won'. That does not make it the best solution. Merely the most successful.

mooreds 14y ago
What is your definition of 'best'? Unfortunately, this argument (which tends to imply technical excellence should trump all other factors in the success of a technology) has been used in technology for a long time, but frankly, in the end doesn't matter. Ask Betamax, OS/2, etc, etc.
- yuhong 14y ago
  I have very bad words against MS on the OS/2 one: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-...
jimbokun 14y ago
Windows won...then lost to the web.

pifflesnort 14y ago

> The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top. It won what, exactly? The war against Gopher for presentation of hypertext documents and information display? There's more to heaven and earth than data presentation and consumption. The examples of genuinely great web applications are few and far between, if not near non-existent. Are Google Apps really the best the web has to offer? Cappuccino provided one example of how to move the browser past the shackles of the traditional HTML/JS/CSS and into a world where developers could work with more accurate abstractions that actually represented the problem domains of application development. This lesson has essentially been ignored, tossing out 3+ decades of experience our industry has in building applications.

corresation 14y ago
There's more to heaven and earth than data presentation and consumption. I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a browser. I get directions in a browser. I find phone numbers in a browser. I phone people in a browser. I video conference in a browser... I can go on and on all day. If you really want to argue that the web is a surrogate for Gopher, this conversation is futile.
- pifflesnort 14y ago
  > I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a browser. I get directions in a browser. I find phone numbers in a browser. I phone people in a browser. I video conference in a browser... I'd be interested to hear how those tools stack up against their native (or cappuccino) counter-parts, because implicit in your argument is that all these attempts to extend the web into the application space are better (and have 'won') over traditional approaches to application development, which I can't say has been my experience, even for the 'best-in-breed' solutions such as Google Apps. Personally, I've found the surge of interest in native development via mobile to be invigorating, since it has meant a resurgence in applications that put user experience ahead of dogma (or even cost). I can hope that this continues to carry over to the desktop and other spheres over the next 5 years.

hackinthebochs 14y ago

It's almost as if you've drunk your own kool-aid. >And they all fell by the wayside. They lacked in features. They lacked in agility. No, no and no. The web "won" because its simple and the lowest common denominator was good enough for most people. The web has always been far behind in terms of features and agility (depending on what you're trying to optimize when it comes to agility). The web won solely because it was "open" and every company had a stake in ensuring no one company could sustain their monopoly. The web sucks and it did not win on its merits.

imissmyjuno 14y ago
But it has won nevertheless. The question then is what we are to do to move the web into the realm of applications. I don't have an answer, but one advantage mobile apps hold is UI standardization. There is no one right way to build an app for the web the way there is for Android or iOS. That's a problem for both the applications authors and users. Cappuccino attempted to solve that problem in a way that did not appeal to programmers, it seems. jQuery UI succeeded to a point, and now Bootstrap seems to be the framework of choice. Perhaps a widget-based UI framework that can target the desktop and mobile devices would make sense.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
Being ubiquitous is a merit.
- npsimons 14y ago
  Which is one of the strongest selling points of Emacs and Vim. Ubiquitous doesn't equate to web based; there are plenty of native apps that are ubiquitous, and on top of that they don't require a constant network connection, or that the server is up. It also seems to me that if you have the source, you can get the software running just about anywhere.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    I don't think we disagree. It's just that on the web ubiquity is free.

particlewave 14y ago

It just happened to be that all browsers adopted HTML/CSS/JS and now we use that as an application platform (despite it being designed for sharing documents). It won because there is no other choice but it kind of still sucks which is why there is so much complaining about it.

dxbydt 14y ago

>The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top. What utter BS. You are essentially celebrating the victory of consumer commerce, not technology X over technology Y. Think about it. There never was any battle between the "Web" and "MFC, Java Applets, Webstart, .NET, Flash, Silverlight". Those thing survive & even thrive in places where nothing else would do. Do you really think everybody in investment banks & brokerages fire up their browser first thing in the morning ? 99% of what they did, do & will continue to do, will continue to be done via native apps - mostly C#, C++, .NET & Java apps. This is just plain reality. It isn't because they are lazy or don't grok the web. Processing realtime trading feeds isn't the browser's strength. Sure I'll show you an iframe with some ticker, equities blotter, trading tickets ...but that's just consumer commerce. I'm soliciting your cash - Here consumer, click on this Buy button, give me your money. After that ? Once you fire off your client request, that's when 99% of the task actually begins, and it ain't on the browser, no siree. The web is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the action is below the surface of the water, and that's not the web & will never be. To your point - the whole idea behind Webstart, Java applets, Winforms, was to mimic the native UI on the web & try to offload as much client-side logic to the client's machine. Turned out customers didn't like "fat clients" - they wanted textfields & simple input forms, accept their inputs & go away & process the inputs elsewhere. We said - Hey, you guys have a fast processor & slow network, let's do this one-time applet download/Webstart download/Silverlight app download, & once done, we won't tax your network, we'll just tax your machine. I wrote one of the first equities trading applet for Goldman Sachs. It was a fat client ~100 MB, you actually waited 10 minutes for the install. But it did so much - all the trading rules validation, portfolio construction & computation, everything happened inside that applet. Once the applet downloaded, it felt & behaved like a native desktop app. It was so much more powerful. There was actual science in that applet. It took a doen CS PhDs to build the infrastructure for shipping that. We fucking got dozens of patents...pseudo-realtime trading applet over the web ha ha ha! Today, the interface is so dumb - zero download time - but they hit the network so much harder. Absolutely nothing happens on the client. To check whether a simple trade is valid, you have to hit the server multiple times during the workflow. Customers are ok with it because the network has gotten so much faster. They were downloading ~100MB applets on 56.6k modems, now they have superfast broadband, so it makes sense to hit the server more & do less on the client box. So you just hire an 18 year old & he'll build a polished web UI for the trading applet over a weekend. That doesn't mean all those CS PhDs just up & died. They just migrated to the server side, where all the action now happens. So this isn't success of the web & failure of the applet - its success of broadband. Network penetration today is massive & ubiquitous. You can place million dollar trades over android. You couldn't do this just 10 years back. At that time, applets were state of the art. In hindsight, the whole exercise appears pointless. 100MB applets WTF, just use underscore dot js & ajax & broadband & a little bit of markup & your trading window shows up on a tiny 4 inch android cellphone. Yeah, true, but we didn't have any of that back then. Cut us a little slack, will ya.

grey-area 14y ago

I broadly agree, but I think perhaps your thesis is a bit premature given the latest push for mobile apps, and (perhaps more dangerous to the web), walled gardens like Facebook. But I think the open web will win in the end, not because of any inherent technical advantage (in some ways it's behind native apps still in terms of performance, look and feel etc), but because the open web has so many advantages for developers and users that in the end it will overcome its disadvantages. Performance and UIS are improving constantly on the web (contrary to the opinion of this poster), so the gap is narrowing. At some point the performance won't matter, offline web work will become possible, the network will be fast and ubiquitous enough and the advantages of the open web will come to the fore. As a developer of web apps and mobile apps, the contrast between deploying a few fixes a day to a website, and working hard on new app versions only to have them rejected by an anonymous gatekeeper at Apple, often for inscrutable and unjustified reasons, then waiting days or weeks for approval, could not be more marked. Things are easier on the desktop, but there are still far more hurdles to deployment, and that matters a lot, as you hint above. The only thing I really miss on the web is a great language to script web pages in, but that will come (js is not my favourite language), and you can use any language you want on the backend, and no-one need know. As a user, the advantages of the open web (i.e. not walled gardens like Facebook) will I think have an irresistible pull - advantages like linkable, shareable content, content on any device, even unforeseen ones, not having to rebuy apps but just subscribing once and accessing content from anywhere. The fact that the web is not controlled by a single vendor as most commercial operating systems or devices are is an added bonus. Finally, I'd argue that the radical simplicity of web technology is actually its greatest strength, as it means it can be deployed almost anywhere, even with limited resources, and give at least some value to users for decades and over any new devices which come out, as opposed to the binaries being created for current platforms which in a decade will be forgotten or dumped by their vendor in favour of the newest flavour of opendoc, .Net, whatever... I find it fascinating that the web delivers consistently better results by virtue of keeping the tech simple and backwards compatible. Worse is better after all.