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Ten Years of Web Browsing
AnamanFan writes "Today in 1993, a group of students at the University of Illinois released a little program called Mosaic. News.com.com.com has a special four-part series on the anniversary. I for one will celebrate by spending extra time with Mozilla and Camino." Slashdot marked the anniversary a little while ago.
IMHO, in 10 years we've progressed in the negative direction in regards to online applications thanks to Mosiac/http/html. 10 years later we're stuck with ecommerce pages that get hopelessly confused if you press the back button. Annoying website timeouts. Complex logic on the backend to handle stateless connections. Ugly front end development models. Half/assed Java Applets/Javascript attempts to actually create decent applications.
Now as a presentation model, the web is great. But as an application infrastructure, we've gone nowhere if not backwards.
The web is great, but I think lately there's been a real focus on making the web do things it shouldn't. And by that, I mean web-based applications.
There are certain things the web can do well application wise. Like an online calendar, or email application (yahoo/hotmail). However, things like office applications should not use web-based technologies. It's always slow and clunky. I mean, sure you can do drag-and-drop with dhtml, but it's inconsistant and slow. I'd much rather deal with a java applet, or ActiveX, so as to have a true GUI instead of a GUI-emulator.
Am I totally off base here, or does anyone else agree?
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