Brian Vargas: What Does "Web Paradigm" Mean, Anyway? (Part 1)

What about the other direction? Can we bring the desktop to the web? The answer is that we've been trying to from the very beginning! The truth is, the web paradigm is only good at a few specific things. Most notable among them are intentional directed arcs between different nodes on the network (a.k.a. links), commonality in languages, and ubiquity in protocol support. It is notoriously bad at everything else. Notice that web applications have always striven to behave more like desktop applications. Since the very beginning, any web application of any complexity yearned to present a stateful, responsive, user-driven application flow. Sessions, cookies, and Javascript were all created with this in mind. Witness the advent of Ajax as the latest effort in this campaign to make the web more like the desktop. It's the next logical step in a path that began with the <FORM> element all those years ago.

Interesting observations.

I recently had my eyes opened to what's possible with AJAX UI's from http://www.bindows.net (hat tip to Sells). Those guys have gone and replicated pretty much all of the Windows XP common control set as in AJAX form -- the result of which is that their demo app looks very much like an XP UI. Totally blew my mind. 

And then I look at the daily builds of Vista that I have running on the desktop in my office. Suddenly, having "XP in a browser" doesn't seem so cool anymore. Having the "old and busted" available in a browser doesn't seem so neat when you have "the new hotness" sitting right in front of you.

I'm all for up-leveling the browser experience, but I don't think it will ever catch up to the desktop at this rate. Of course, looking at the web 5 years ago, I would have been very surprised to see things like Bindows available today. Maybe the next five years will surprise me.