Post Archive
› June 3, 2005
When is an interface not a document?
So I guess the end-game with webstandards is single-source documents that can be viewed in handhelds, phones, web browsers, and technologies not yet revealed.. ad infenitum. This all sounds good, but lately I've been thinking about the "documents" part. What if the website you're making is really more of an interface? Web app or not, when you have little widgets that do things, and fancy do-dads that push/pull snips of data, aren't you moving away from the document model, and towards something else? Where does an application model fall into the scope of things? How about Flash? Is it better to push these application-like features into the document object model, or pull them out and place only for devices trully capable of using them? Lots of questions, feel free to school me or leave your own questions.
Comments
1. June 3, 2005 06:47 AM
2. June 3, 2005 07:32 AM
Guy Posted…
Tom Mason Posted… This is without doubt the worst-written article I have ever read on WebGraphics.
Lol :-)
That made me laugh out loud for quite some time. Cheers!
3. June 3, 2005 09:13 AM
4. June 3, 2005 09:33 AM
Rob Posted…
this is a discussion I've been having with a colleague of mine, on and off, for the past month or so.
I personally believe that the DOM should and can be levered to produce rich applications and that those apps can still retain flexibility across the majority of platforms. He disagrees and is firmly of the belief that the use of HTML, CSS and Javascript to distribute web apps is too limiting to remain viable in the long term.
Whilst the concept of a dedicated, global application model is atracttive I don't think it is likely to take off due to the inherent difficulties in developing a cross platform framework within which the model can operate - web tech has been around for decades and that is still far from being standardised.
3rd party technolgies like Flash and Java are possibly the best hope for such a platform but there reliance on plugins makes them very difficult to distribute across the range of devices, e.g. there is no flash player for my phone yet it does support SVG and Java MRE.
In the mean time I'm going to continue to focus my efforts on leveraging the existing toolset to the best of my abilities - it's still the best bet for global support
5. June 3, 2005 10:31 AM
Nate Posted…
I think you're probably right Rob, while there is a "square peg for round hole" issue with using a document model, it's probably more realistic than some brand new model that would attempt to cover such a broad range as web apps cover.
I think I'm just a little tired of the two "bones" we are thrown for non-document structuring.. span and div, are truly handy in their non-semantical-ness, but why can't we have navigation based structures, date and archiving structures, etc.
This ties into microformats which seems like a solid effort to address the millions of ways document based semantics can be interpreted. But it doesn't quite feel like enough. Hmmm.
6. June 3, 2005 01:02 PM
Ethan Posted…
While they will will come from a quite less informed mind as those last two posted, I do have some thoughts. This is my first delving into this area of discussion so I might say something really stupid...
I think that a cross-platform, standardsed document platform is ideal, but sadly very implausible, simply because of the limitations that support for phones and handhelds would put on documents meant for viewing in a browser.
Obviously a phone cannot view everything a browser can, the screen is too small even if it did support all of the plugins. But then the documents on the web are ideally supposed to be able to be viewed with a phone. Hence you must limit the complexity and viewing power that you have on a pc, simply to make your page portable.
On the hand of alternate versions of your page for phones and handhelds, respectively; this is tedious. Even if you have a PHP based site with a database backend so that you can automatically generate an alternate page for every page you already have, you must write code to determine the browser/platform, and write a whole other set of code, another site really, just for phones/handhelds.
Then you could argue a cross-platform standard that only has full useability on a desktop, and partially limits what you can do on handheld devices. This doesn't sound very standard, and you still have to make a different page to support handhelds.
I probably sound like an idiot that doesn't know what he's talking about. I would agree, I wasn't able to communicate my ideas very well, but there you go. :D
Tom Mason Posted…
This is without doubt the worst-written article I have ever read on WebGraphics.