On Mar 24, 2008, at 5:28 PM, Phil Pennock wrote:
On 2008-03-24 at 07:26 -0700, Joshua Juran wrote:
A desktop application can download mail or news batch-
wise for
offline viewing, but a Web app can't, except for what it can cram
into the
browser session -- it can't automatically save anything to disk.
Not true any longer. Whether or not this is a good thing, I leave to
you to decide. ;^) Also: only in the, uhm, "fuller" graphical
browsers.
Exactly my point. The whole premise of Web development's superiority
over the desktop is that it's platform independent -- you don't have
to build for every device you want to support. But any plugins you
rely on have to be built and deployed for each device, canceling the
advantage. Now you have the limited portability of a desktop app
with the security-mandated restraints of a Web app.
It's time we realized that Web applications are not hypertext
documents, and actually created a system which was *designed* to
deliver them. As long as we're forcing users to install extra
software anyway, why bottleneck everything through the Web browser?
Because we've always done it that way?
Josh
