Respectfully, I am not the typical poster here. I am a revolutionary and a trailblazer, and everything I do is geared for maximum effect. I have precisely zero interest in working for paychecks or even creating something for the purpose of selling out to a corporation. I am interested in starting a truly socialist movement... one whose participants understand that like it or not, we are constantly moving into a post-capitalist future.
This ultimately just means that the historical corporate/ad buying business model will slowly give way to models that have the notion of "social capital" at their core. For any arbitrarily complicated web domain that does not live and die by the ad revenue "sword" -- for example a university or a municipality -- there is the ever present problem of getting naive users to navigate the domain. Today's websites typically do not use much logic when organizing their resources. It all comes down to physical page space. So if one page becomes too crowded with content, then another page must be created. Then the problem reduces to how to develop a menu of links that allows to user to navigate to the appropriate resource. At the moment, there are no standards as to how a site should organize its content. Everyone has to roll their own navigation solution, and when happening upon a new domain for the first time, a user has to spend an arbitrary amount of time parsing the visual layout, in order to create a site tree in their minds. For everyone who says that the desktop environment is simply a "metaphor", I would have to disagree. Our modern desktop GUI's are the result of a evolutionary process... a process that has resulted in the most intuitive and powerful of navigation systems. All that I am saying is that we stop thinking of the client-side as a mere afterthought. For anyone who wants to devote their efforts towards codifying a standard client-side browser web-app interface, there will be countless service providers who will breathe a sigh of relief that they will no longer be forced to worry about layout and navigation. And yes, I know there have been many many efforts in the past that have tried to bring the desktop experience into the browser. The first obvious problem is that Javascript has only recently become performant enough to allow there to be pretty much zero difference from the native OS in terms of icon/window handling. Next, all of those other efforts were pre-HTML5, which pretty much forced the applications to rely upon a back end for the purpose of saving state. But now, there are so many different ways to save to the client, it actually makes me blush! And last but not least, we are really talking about doing a kind radical paradigm inversion that conservative corporate interests just have no interest in. The politics of the modern WWW is such that most websites are completely in service of the corporate bottom line. And since corporations have historically been all about buying up ad space/ad time in whatever medium it can (print, radio, TV...), the Web has inevitably found itself as having this exact same kind of role. So there really is not "allowed" to be very much creativity on the Web, if this creativity would only confuse/aggravate the corporate bosses who are just trying to hawk their wares to as many naive consumers as possible. The result of all of this political mumbo-jumbo is that the lowly web developer is forced to think of him/herself as a mere layout designer... such that the given layout gives sufficient prominence to whatever ad space it is trying to sell. So the Web becomes nothing but a series of static magazine-like page layouts. The only difference being that Web pages have magic "hyperlinks" that quickly move us between arbitrary pages. In this case, the programming language of the Web (Javascript) is completely in service of the thing (the DOM) that allows for the representation of the layouts. The paradigm inversion ultimately comes down to making the layout representations completely in service of the programming language. The popular view is that Javascript exists primarily to allow for popup menus and client-side form validation. This view holds that Javascript is fundamentally incapable of allowing for the kind of functionality that I have demonstrated. So anyone who tries to do what I am attempting must be fully aware of all of these issues, and must have the appropriate battle plan in place. Anyone who simply has the "bright idea" to start using Javascript in order to mimic desktop functionality is pretty much doomed to irrelevance if they are not able to mount a good enough challenge against the corporate interests of yore. Which brings me back to the original point I made on this post. In order to pull off this paradigm shift, I realize that I have to become a "larger than life" figure. I have to turn myself into a kind of heroic figure in the minds of the average Web using public. I currently live in Gainesville, Florida which is home to the massively important institution known as the University of Florida. I was published as the lead story in the UF student newspaper (The Alligator) under the title, "Turlington Dancer Spreads Love, Equality." I like to keep myself in terrific shape and walk around in public wearing very short shorts. I have recently started a roadside campaign, where I've been holding a sign that says, "Fall in Luv with the Web... LuvLuvLuv.info". You should really see me dancing out there... it's a sight to behold! By doing this I am making myself the kind of public figure who has the kind of celebrity status to at least have a fighting chance against the fat cat corporate bosses. I mean, Google itself is still forced to operate under the old paradigm because its fate rests in the hands of the old business model. There is really not much that Google can do because its very identity is wrapped up in the notion that the Web is truly all about a networked set of static, hyperlinked documents. But anything I am involved with will begin from the premise that our browsers ultimately exist simply to provide a thin layer between the hardware and the application. Our in-browser API's are constantly providing more and more access to the native OS. Application developers can start worrying solely about business logic without any of the mechanism logic getting in the way. Whenever we want to accomplish a non-trivial task on our computers, we are very often faced with the decision of whether to allow a given native application to gain full, naked access to our hardware. There is always the inveitable, dreaded prompt that asks if we would like to give program X the ability to... get ready for it... MAKE CHANGES TO THE SYSTEM. So now we can just start thinking of our browsers as the ultimate sandboxes that have very sophisticted interface building and networking tools. It will slowly start to dawn on native applications developers that there is just no longer very much demand for their products and services, and they will be required to live under the contraints that the in browser Javascript environment enforces. Everything I am doing, then, is a bet against a vision of the future that sees the web browser as the only user space native application on any given computer. Upon booting up, the browser will launch automatically in full screen mode (with no way of minimizing it!). Given this vision of the future of personal computing, doesn't it make sense to start investing time and energy towards making the client interface as intuitive, configurable, and powerful as possible? -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to nodejs@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to nodejs+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
