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Sophistication in Web Applications?
whit537 asks: "Anyone who uses Gmail for 5 minutes can see that it's a pretty dern sophisticated web application. But just how sophisticated? Well, first of all, the UI is composed of no less than nine iframes (try turning off the page styles in Firefox with View > Page Style). But then consider that these iframes are generated and controlled by a 1149 line javascript. This script includes no less than 1001 functions, and 998 of these functions have one- or two-letter names! They're obviously not maintaining this script by hand in that form. So do they write human-readable javascripts and then run them all together, or have they developed some sort of web app UI toolkit in Python? Does Gmail need to be this complex or is the obfuscation a deliberate attempt to prevent reverse-engineering? And are there any other web apps that are this sophisticated?"
Google became an integral part of the web some years back.
Lately, to me at least, a similar potential became clear with Suprnova (remember when someone posted the link to Jon Stewart on CNN?).
But I fear for both of these web apps,for the same reason Real's attempt to own Internet video was bad, Apple's pitch to own web music is bad, and MS's ongoing attempts to own HTML, etc. are bad.
The ubiquity of MP3s, Bit Torrent, Mozilla, Mplayer and VLC, and Linux in general have held back these bastards as they try to make us always see things from businesses' points of view; as they try to force us to watch ads; as they try to destroy competative organizations, competative ideas, copetative desires; as they grudgingly accept technologies whose powers WE embrace, only to try to twist them into empty shells of thier possibilities.
Google's claim to not be "evil" is a very relative claim -- they don't have flashing banners and pop-ups, but they do have ads, and lots of them; they don't sell fake search results, but they do play ball with China; they have a bottom line, and they will be motivated by that. They will try to destroy the Wikipedia, for example, should that or something else one day prove to be a true threat.