F
FISH
Roedy Green said:The natural evolution would have been to use Applets for data entry,
and send the digested information to a server. This would allow
bounds checking, etc. etc so that you would find out about errors the
keystroke you made them.
This did not happen.
[Excuse the late response]
While I cannot disagree with what you wrote above, I think you have
missed the real virtue of applets... they provide an opportunity to
do rich user interfaces in a way that forms cannot.
Web forms are still very much tied to their roots - HTTP queries.
They gather information to transfer via GET or POST to some form of
software on the server side, which returns dynamically generated
content. This is why you don't see sophisticated components like
trees, sliders, tables, etc.
With applets, MS's Hotmail could actually look and work like their
Outlook Express client. It could even work off-line. Its UI would
be as slick and responsive, and contain all the sophistication of a
genuine POP3 client. It could, for example, allow one message to be
read or edited, while others were still being downloaded from the
server in the background.
An e-Bay applet would enable users to keep track of all their bids
and auctions in real time - with minimal trafic across the network.
Imagine how much easier Google Groups would be if it actually had
a proper Newsreader interface, as opposed to a crude HTML approx-
imation? Likewise Yahoo Groups, MSN Groups and other on-line
forums!
Now, while I agree with whose who might cry "why would I want a POP3
client applet, when I have a perfectly good stand alone client on my
desktop!" (To which the reply can only be "why would you want a
webmail account when you have a perfectly good...etc".) The point
is really, as I suspect you'd agree Roedy, we never got to find out
truly how useful, or otherwise, such rich interface pages might have
been - its a path which is largely untravelled. (And to be honest I
don't think Shockwave/Flash is really cut out for doing serious
application-style interfaces.)
-FISH- ><>