On Tue, 2004-10-12 at 03:43, Andrew Ho wrote: > On Mon, 12 Oct 2004, Tim Churches wrote: > > > On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 16:59, Andrew Ho wrote: > ... > > > Tim, > > > 1) This is no more "grief" than having different buttons on different > > > web pages. > > > > It is when **the same application** behaves differently with different > > browsers. > > Tim, > No matter how different each web-browser behaves, it is no worse than > running different desktop applications, each with their own unique > interface and features.
OK, whatever you say. > Going back to what Karsten said, browser features > such as access keys (and XUL) allow browser-accessible applications to > emulate functionalities of desktop applications. As this trend continues, > web-based EMR systems will become increasingly useful. If everyone's browser was based on Mozilla, then XUL would be great. But the reality is that Mozilla-based browsers are never going to gain more than 50% of the "market", and probably somewhat less. Thus to support XUL-based applications, you then require prospective users to install Firefox or Mozilla. That's probably a good thing for them to do anyway, but the whole idea of Web aps is that they run on a thin client (the browser) which users are very likely to already have installed. If you require them to install a new browser, then might as well give them a package of, say, wxWindows and Python, to install so your app can use a rich, fully-fledged GUI (although XUL doesn't leave much out). At this stage, there really is no one, right answer to the question of the best development and deployment platform for open source applications. And we haven't even mentioned Mono for .NET. C# is actually a reasonable language, and things like IronPython will make .NET even more attractive. But I worry that Microsoft will play its patent card(s) against free, open source implementations of .NET > > > 2) Different desktop applications also support different hot keys > > > (=access keys). > > > > Sure, but that is not analogous. If you re-read the Web page to which > > you referred, you'll see that the same hot-key keystrokes in the same > > Web application but under different browsers will result in different > > actions. > > There are several ways to resolve this issue. We encountered the same > situation with using SVG for making graphs and diagrams in the OIO system. > Our solution is to recommend using Mozilla with SVG built-in. :-) Once again you've found the answer to the problem. -- Tim C PGP/GnuPG Key 1024D/EAF993D0 available from keyservers everywhere or at http://members.optushome.com.au/tchur/pubkey.asc Key fingerprint = 8C22 BF76 33BA B3B5 1D5B EB37 7891 46A9 EAF9 93D0
