Jargons of Info Tech industry

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

Mike Meyer wrote:
>> This can be designed much better by using iframes, maybe even Ajax.
 >
> Definitely with Ajax. That's one of the things it does really well.

But then you're probably limited to the big 4 of browsers: MSIE, 
Mozilla, KHTML/Safari, Opera.  Ok, that should cover most desktop users, 
but you might run into problems on embedded.

I've also noticed that especially web forums and dynamic websites take 
up looots of memory on my machine (but then I have loooots).

>>> Why can't we use the Web for what it was meant for: viewing hypertext
>>> pages? Why must we turn it into a wrapper around every application
>>> imaginable?
>> Because it works?
> 
> Because you can - if you know how to use HTML properly - distribute
> your application to platforms you've never even heard of - like the
> Nokia Communicator.

If the NC has software that can properly interpret all that HTML, CSS, 
JavaScript plus image formats, yes.  But who guarantees that?  I'd 
rather develop a native client for the machine that people actually WANT 
to use, instead of forcing them to use that little-fiddly web browser on 
a teeny tiny display.

And again: connections might be slow, a compact protocol is better than 
loading the whole UI every time.  And while Ajax might work, despite the 
UI being maybe too big for the little browser window, and even if it 
works, it's still probably more work than a simple, native UI.  First of 
all it needs to load all the JS on first load, secondly sometimes for a 
flexible UI you'd have to replace huge parts of the page with something 
else.  Native UIs are more up to the task.

> I started writing web apps when I was doing internal tools development
> for a software development company that had 90+ different platform
> types installed inhouse. It was a *godsend*. By deploying one

If that's 90+ GUI platforms, then I agree.  I just wonder who wrote 
fully standards compliant web browsers for those 90 platforms.  If you 
have one Windows GUI (maybe C#), one Mac GUI (Cocoa), one Gtk GUI for X, 
you're done.  A GUI should be the smallest bunch of work on any given 
application, so it's not prohibitive to write a couple of them, IMHO. 
But then I've only ever used Swing and Cocoa and the latter *is* really 
convenient, might be that the others are a PITA, who knows...

> well-written app, I could make everyone happy, without having to do
> versions for the Mac, Windows, DOS (this was a while ago), getting it
> to compile on umpteen different Unix version, as well as making it
> work on proprietary workstation OS's.

Well, stick to POSIX and X APIs and your stuff should run fine on pretty 
much all Unices.  I never understood those people who write all kinds of 
weird ifdefs to run on all Unices.  Maybe that was before my time, 
during the Unix wars, before POSIX.  And if it's not Unix, what's a 
prop. workstation OS?

> Of course, considering the state of most of the HTML on the web, I
> have *no* idea why most of them are doing this.

Yep.  Maybe it would be best to reengineer the whole thing as ONE UI 
spec+action language, incompatible with the current mess, compact, so it 
can be implemented with minimum fuss.  And most of all, I wouldn't use a 
MARKUP language, as a real application is not text-based (at least not 
as characteristic #1).

-- 
I believe in Karma.  That means I can do bad things to people
all day long and I assume they deserve it.
	Dogbert