On Sun, 26 Jun 2005, Karl Pongratz wrote:
Graham,
(James actually :) )
My point is, you can browse web documents, but you can't browse web applications, the browsing model is out of date.
How do you distinguish the two? If we agree (we may not, I don't think you mentioned this) that it's undesirable to let web sites disable features such as the back button (and, because of phishing scams, this is certainly the direction that UA vendors are moving in - for example chromeless windows are likely to become extinct in the near future) there needs to be a way to distinguish between a web site and a (trustworthy) web app - is the WHATWG mailing list subscription form an example of a document or of an app? You can certianly browse to it and away from it but it has some app-like functionality. If we let that page disable the back button presumably there'll be no way to stop any other site from doing so and we'll suffer all the UI problems I previously described.
Proving a simple, fixed, navigational paradigm isn't "out of date", it's essential to the usability of the web. If you want to introduce technology that allows authors to break that model in situations where the it doesn't make sense [1] you have to make _really_sure_ you don't allow them to break it anywhere else.
[1] These are rarer than people believe - in general you should try to write applications that can deal with the back button and other browser-provided navigation, rather than break when it is used.
