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Permissions are a real problem of installed apps, but otherwise I wonder if web apps are that much better _if_ they are really applications and not documents/co
by fauigerzigerk 13y ago
Permissions are a real problem of installed apps, but otherwise I wonder if web apps are that much better _if_ they are really applications and not documents/content.
The general functionality provided by web browsers (URLs, the back button, searching in a apge, etc) is very useful as a common basis for different content centric sites. But it just doesn't work very well for applications regardless of whether or not these applications are based on HTML/JavaScript or on some other GUI toolkit.
Yes the back button can be made to do _something_ in any app. But how can users have a reasonable expectation or intuition of what it's going to do? "Go back" used to mean "show me the page I saw before clicking the hyperlink". Bookmarking meant "remember the current page".
But applications don't have pages, they have states. Pages are concrete. States are abstract. That is the real problem, not the specific technology on which applications are based.
- frik 13y agoIt's called one-page app. You can control the browser tab history with HTML5/JS5 and create WebApps that offer all the same functionally you see in most native apps.
- fauigerzigerk 13y agoI think you misunderstand me. I didn't say it was technically impossible to create applications based on HTML/JavaScript that have similar functionality to installed apps. What I said is that if you do that, you get the very same UX problems as well. You can implement back button functionality in either technology, but what it does needs to be reinterpreted for every single app because you have lost the page as a concrete unit of reference. There may be other useful units of reference, but they are different ones in different apps regardless of technology.