[current]
Bruce Eckel, whom many of us know from his outstanding
'
Thinking in...' series, has discovered the RAD GUI aspect
of plain old HTML. This is something I really applaud, an
instructor in programming languages (C++, Java, Python)
advocates the use of (desktop-)http
(app)server and HTML as GUI. Go read his thoughts now, if
you haven't already.
There's a few things I'd like to add:
- Jon Udel championed this idea a long time ago, in his
book 'Practical Internet Groupware'.
- Tools like Radio Userland, AmphetaDesk,
Zoë
etc. show that the idea can be used in very powerfull
ways.
- And there's a very special
property HTML-GUIs have I'd like to stress: HTML is almost
by nature more accessible than
any Desktop GUI I've seen or tried to date. (Try increasing
the font-size in Explorer or Finder by doing
ctrl+scrollwheel anyday...)
- The MVC way of viewing webapps has actually hindered
the wide adoption of HTML GUIs. Making the data travel back
and forth between server and browser has lead to the now so
common 'edit-click-wait-edit' cycle we all know and
hate from webapps (esp. If there is large amounts of data
to be entered in each form). Also inter-form dependencies
(ask for parents name if younger than 18) can only be
modelled with great pain if you need to reload the whole
page for each change.
- There are ways out of that, though: client-side
scripting (JavaScript), and on top of thatm, partial
content update. (remote scripting)
- Now, usually a HTML form enhanced with
client side scripting become cumbersome to update or
maintain, but there's also very nice ways around that: take
Stu Langdrige's 'Unobstrusive DHTML'
for example, and you
end up with super simple and easy to maintain HTML that has
some very nice GUI features in the browser.
[ by Martin>]
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Martin Spernau
Big things to come (TM) 30th Dez 2002
