Thanks for all the replies. > >> The continued rise of AJAX would seem to suggest that the browser is > still going strong , at least to me anyway. Client side scripting has come > on leaps and bounds since the dark old days of DHTML .
I like AJAX but it still has the request/reply problem although much less noticable. I have been disappointed plain DHTML has not been taken further to provide something practical and handle a reasonable amount of data after page load. For a basic example, Mood News has a big (400 ish) array of stories and the filtering DHTML would have been possible in browsers 5 years ago. I am sure this approach has more potential however it is server heavy and easy to avoid by using dynamic sites. As to 3D, I put together a little mockup and in the end decided the 3D aspect was unimportant. The idea was a scene showing Outerspace, Sky, Land and Underground. News stories would cause scenery or objects to appear. At the moment the Shuttle is in orbit so this would appear as a rocket in Space with a tooltip access to related stories. A big war story would cause a tank to appear etc. Not too difficult to program as long as you can pick up the right news stories. Fiddling with graphics (ok I can't draw for toffee!) and the fact the programming was probably a little dull put me off taking it further. Feel free to take up the idea :-) A Flash or SVG version would be particularly cool :-) >Is a browser even necessary? What would it take to cut the browser out of >the picture entirely? Already, RSS to speech works pretty well though if a good story comes up I will look it up in a browser later. The semantic web will probably make the browser less important - after all the web is one interface to the Internet. Apps like Kazaa, Doom3, Word etc spring to mind. Not sure where browsers are heading other than standard vectors and better form controls in the next 3 major versions(?). The rest will be left to plugins and stand-alone applications. I've another idea on the go at the moment that could be a standard desktop or possibly slightly AJAX based so this kind of discussion is really useful :-) Cheers, Davy Mitchell http://www.latedecember.com - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
