Slashdot Mirror

Take a look at
ZOE. It does all this and more.

I think that there is an even better way for doing this: Zoe! I think it is ideal for what you are doing and I found it to be surprisingly "intelligent".

ZOE is an email client. It's also a email server. And a long term
archive. And a search engine. And an application server. All that at
once on your desktop. Or server. Or both. Or it doesn't matter because
client and server are the same.

The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox)
what Google did for the web... The Google principle: It doesn't matter
where information is because I can get to it with a keystroke.
So what is Zoe? Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly,
continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages.
The end result is this intertwingled web of information. Messages put in
context. Your very own knowledge base accessible at your fingertip. No
more "attending to" your messages. The messages organization is done
automatically for you so as to not have the need to "manage" your email.
Because once information is available at a keystroke, it doesn't matter
in which folder you happened to file it two years ago. There is no
folder. The information is always there. Accessible when you need it. In
context.

I think this is a step in the right direction. I have been using it for a while now - check it out.

"The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web... The Google principle: It doesn't matter where information is because I can get to it with a keystroke. So what is Zoe? Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly, continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages. The end result is this intertwingled web of information. Messages put in context. Your very own knowledge base accessible at your fingertip. No more "attending to" your messages. The messages organization is done automatically for you so as to not have the need to "manage" your email. Because once information is available at a keystroke, it doesn't matter in which folder you happened to file it two years ago. There is no folder. The information is always there. Accessible when you need it. In context." ZOE

i didn't say there's no room for improvement, in fact I said that i'm sure there will be improvement, in little, incremental ways. what i said was that the innovative new ideas are happening elsewhere on the web, meaning at the server side, and in web-aware apps that borrow functionality from web browsers, or even client-side apps that use your web browser as a tool (e.g. see zoe, freenet, privoxy, etc). HTTP 1.1 right now is good enough to be ubiquitous, and entrenched enough to be hard to change anyway.

I would love to see some innovative new version of HTTP, but the large steps have been made, and I don't see any others happening for a while. this is exactly why web browsers haven't really changed. I pointed out that p2p web stuff would be a huge innovation, I think, it's just not happening. I also think that RDF-aware web browsers could make good innovations, such as embedding RDF descriptions of websites (via the LINK tag), which would let your browser know of related sites, the syndication URL, specific ways of donating money to the site, ways of rating the site or discovering it's "whuffie", what the copyright on the content is ... I can keep going if you want.

Show me a web application that takes the full power of a web browser (NS 6.1+ IE 5+) and uses it.

That still really makes me laugh, because the point is that "the full power" of a web browser is very basic, and it's there in every web browser, and it has nothing to do with CSS/DHTML or any flashy shit. This is WHY web apps don't use that flashy shit, because they don't need to, they can harness the "full power" very simply. You can't see that? sorry.

I guess we're arguing over what's "innovative". New buttons on the toolbar for searching google, new ways of managing bookmarks, etc. these are all improvements, sure, but not innovative. New tags in HTML, new layout methods, new CSS attributes, these are all improvements, but not innovative (HTML/CSS is just making the web more and more like print/page layout in the way it looks). Marc Andreessen laments the browser's lack of "innovation", but that's just being ignorant to all of the other "innovation" out there. Wikis, Blogs, syndication, trackbacks, moderation...

Here's an innovation: invent the Metaverse. Not VRML, which requires a stupid plugin, but a whole new browser-like application. The components are already there, the bandwidth is there (if you're on broadband) and the graphics cabability is there.

Have fun with your HTTP 1.2 gzip stuff, and your NS6+ and IE6 features!

Also, if you care to include radically new web interfaces, ala email vis-a-vis google, I recommend you keep an eye on zoë Looks quite promising though it's admitedly in it's early goings on...