• Reported by liorean

Anyone listening to recent ramblings of Anne van Kesteren, Ian Hickson or myself will by now have heard of the situation with the W3C members and their standpoint on web applications. The Mozilla and Opera methodology seems to be severely out of favour among the W3C members, who seem to consider the web browser something of the past, something with no real importance for the future of the web. I strongly believe the opposite. The web browser is the single most important piece in the puzzle that is the web - from the user perspective. The user doesn't want to download plug-ins. If they come with the browser, fine, but they don't want to download them. Same goes for client-side applications, whether running in the background or running as application windows. For a web application technology to work, one of the requirements, as I see it, is that it works from out of the web, out of the browser, without requiring any additional runtime engines or virtual machines. Sending such runtime engines or virtual machines with the technology is not a viable option from many perspectives.

WHAT the Web Hypertext Application Technologies Working Group is a newly created open and public collaboration, consisting of browser vendors and other interested parts, which will be working on extending HTML and other browser technologies in use today into a web application platform that is widely interoperable and easily deployable. If you are interested in the future of web applications, join the WHAT mailing list.