Hertzfeld, impatient to move Chandler along, proposes a radical idea: Mozilla, he points out, is already structured to incorporate other programs as plug-ins. Why not build Chandler itself as one big Mozilla plug-in? Of course, he admits, there'd be problems. A browser-based design would certainly require a lot of rethinking of Chandler's goals. But relying on the browser's interface would save the programmers enormous amounts of the labor involved in building a new interface themselves.
"There's so much work ahead of us. It would be great to strap on some booster rockets," he says.
Michael Toy had often brought up the Mozilla option himself, but this time he raises cautions. "It's been forty thousand years since the invention of the Internet, and we still don't have a way for dumb people to make Web sites that are useful. And a Web browser is not a very good interface to something that is not the Web. It just seems like we'd be strapping a bad backpack on before we start walking".
(Rosenberg: pp. 154-155)
This was obviously before AJAX, Google Maps, Google Mail and a whole slew of other cool web applications Google (among others) has released in the past few years. I'd say by now we have finally reached a point where a webapp can do almost as much as a typical desktop application, and it certainly is the case already for things like email, tasks and calendars. As a matter of fact, there are plenty of users who already rely on web email for their work and personal communications. It's reliable, fast enough, OS independent, relieves the user from worrying about backups and, above all, it's mobile. It finally looks as if the time has come for the web to take over and render the underlying operating system almost irrelevant. This is something that many could see coming since the second half of the 1990s, but it truly didn't become a real possibility until these latest developments that took place in the past couple of years.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario