begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 08:48:06AM -0700: > John H. Robinson, IV wrote: > > The downside is that webbrowsers are so prevalent, and follow a rough > > standard, that everyone thinks that is the best way to go to be > > cross-platform. And it stinks. > > It isn't the best way to go to be cross-platform?
"Best"? That depends. Low bandwidth? Patchy latency? Requirements for interactivity? Not so much. Serving up plain old data? Wonderful. Engaging in a conversation with lots of back-and-forth? Not so much. Reporting on a conversation that had lots of back-and-forth? Wonderful. The problem with "let's use a web-browser for everything" is that it's being used as a... panacea. Which means it's going to be used inappropriately from time to time. A conversation via email, mailing lists, or newsgroups makes *far* more sense to me than a conversation in a "web forum". Filing an initial bug report via a web-form doesn't seem so bad (unless it requires javascript and/or requires more than one or two fields to be entered). It's the "check this web-page every couple of days to see if there's been a response" stuff that annoys the heck out of me. I don't like the browser as an "application platform", as that leads into the developer wanting full control over my browser so they can control the appearance and behavior. It gets to the point where they start requiring *specific* browsers, and specific versions of those browsers... which means we're right back to "cross-platform" in name only. Might as well just ship me a program at that point. -Stewart "The server should neither know nor care about the browser" Stremler
pgpdA7r321X3x.pgp
Description: PGP signature
-- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
