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A friend of mine, a talented
front end web-guy, showed me his work last night. He works for an Internet
startup that morphed into a consulting company. I hadn't talk with him
in a while and I wanted to see what he was up to. The resulting converstation and demo deeply troubled me prompting me to write this article. It went something like this:
"ok now go to the webpage url-ext.company.com and login as demo
with mypassword"
"ok
I'm in."
"ok
now click on the VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) button."
"uh
- I don't see it."
"do you see the blue logo ? under there."
"ya
I see the logo - but no button."
"(a
bit fearful) what?"
(1)
"(guessing as to the cause) does it work
with netscape?"
(2)"no
you'll have to upgrade to IE 5.0 or better."
"how
to I access it in linux?"
"you can't - we dictate what browser the users must use - in
order to improve performance we moved much of the programming logic
to the client to stop round trips to the server."
"ok
I'll try later on another machine."
...
I thought about the incident
for a while. The troubling thing for me was this is a person who I respect. It hit me later what an appropriate reply might
be to this conversation. It might go like this:
...
"this
isn't a web site. you have created a proprietary client server application."
"what?"
"ya - it is really not different from a visual basic application
written in the early nineties- the only difference is that you don't
have to worry about the client install and you are using the HTTP
protocol."
"no
- this is a web application - it uses Internet Explorer."
"ok
- what defines a web application - it runs over the TCP protocol,
using HTTP, and conforms to standard HTML as defined by the World
Wide Web Consortium. Netscape 7.0 PR1 (I wouldn't mention Mozilla)
conforms to that standard better than IE 6.0."
"we
decided to stop supporting Netscape 4.7, it was too much work."
"the
W3C created these standards so the web would work better for everyone
- your application is not a web application - it might as well be
a word template with scripting in it."
...
Microsoft's proprietary programming tools are a lot like fast food on a road trip.
You are in a rush and it is easy to pick up and you seem to initially
save time. Near the end you feel bloated and sick. Lets stop Microsoft's destruction
of the World Wide Web via its .NET initiative and proprietary Web extensions.
(1) Thinking back on it,
perhaps my question should have been "is it DOM compliant?"
(2) I love how people always say _upgrade_ - what about add some code
to your computer that will slow it down and change the kernel.
references:
World
Wide Web Consortium
Mozilla
Other
Linux Ramblings
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