heisel.org

Web sites as applications

Wednesday | June 23, 2004 | 3:38 pm  

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “improving” the UI of the Web. Mostly by trying to add stan­dards for “rich” clients.

Gruber has come back with an equally thought­full, and in my opin­ion, cor­rect analy­sis of the Web’s strengths.

Essen­tially, the Web is a dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy (OK, that’s a no duh… give me a sec).

Alot of folks smarter than me are coming to the con­clu­sion that the Web is a dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy for tra­di­tional, rich apps.

I’ve actu­ally been mulling the strengths of Web-vs.-rich apps for a while as I’ve been taking on more devel­op­ment projects at work.

If you look at Gruber’s piece and Ian Bicking’s follow-​up you can come away with a list of strengths of the Web:

• Easy to deploy — Upload your new mod­ules, (or fine, your php files, your jars, etc.) and your clients — each and every one of them — has the new app.

  Even with their “you’ll down­load our updates and you’ll like it” approach to Win­dows Update, even Microsoft can’t offer that kind of speed or breadth of deployment.

• Con­sis­tent UI — Unless you go and do some major Javascript­ing or Flash­ing your site prob­a­bly looks like a Web site. It has links, form wid­gets, text and photos.

  Users can sit down at any Web site and they’ll be in a better posi­tion to figure out your apps func­tion­al­ity. They’ll grok the how they only need to know the what.

• Easily portable — Assum­ing you abide by the stan­dards you get instant porta­bil­ity and com­pata­bil­ity to any device that ren­ders (X)HTML, prac­ti­cally for free.

  In fact, its often in a vain attempt to achieve some sem­blance of “richness” that devel­op­ers in/advertendly lock them­selves into one plat­form.

What does all this mean for news media pub­lish­ing to the Web (and who isn’t). Here’s a quick list of recommendations:

1. Don’t pursue ‘richness’ at all costs — If your lock­ing out users of dif­fer­ent plat­forms (and plat­forms now include cell­phones, PDAs, and search engines — among others) in an attempt to achieve “richness”, stop.

   Plenty of users, on plenty of other Web sites have shown that they’re per­fectly capa­ble of han­dling a “non-rich” client.

   I know that those cool Javascript/Java/Flash demos are impres­sive when you’re sit­ting in a con­fer­ence room look­ing at a site. But try using the site instead…

2. Don’t lock your(self and) users out — News­pa­pers are par­tic­u­larly bad about pur­su­ing the largest audi­ence to the detri­ment of others.

   Why not, its in our blood. We pro­duce one prod­uct (don’t give me that zone smack, that’s not true cus­tomiza­tion) for one mono­lithic audience.

   That don’t cut it on the Web. The Web is made up of a myriad of users, with a myriad of user-​agents, fonts, font-​sizes, and screen res­o­lu­tions — not to men­tion oper­at­ing sys­tems.

   It’s too easy for news­pa­pers to say “Well IE is our major audience.” It sounds an awful lot like “40- to 60-year-olds are our major audience,” — and we all know how well that mind­set has served print readership….

   When you lock out users, you’re lock­ing your­self out of the future. Browsers, and oper­at­ing sys­tems change — but your users will, hope­fully, still like to visit your site.

3. Embrace the Web­ness — Ok, I made that word up. Here’s a short, and glib, strat­egy for doing that:

   Be more like a Web log, and use clicks. :-)

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