[Article] Great Browser Expectations

Hey everyone,

I came back from Canada on Rails and was so inspired that I wrote an
article
on the plane.

It’s my attempt to distill what I have learned so far, working on AJAX
applications in Rails that people will hopefully want to use.

Feedback is appreciated!

Pete

Pete F. wrote:

Hey everyone,

I came back from Canada on Rails and was so inspired that I wrote an
article on the plane.

unspace.ca

Cool! I totally agree. Your site is a good example of the power of
simplicity: i.e. you should have as much fancy web2.0 stuff (AJAX, css,
DHTML, rounded corners etc.) as needed, but not even a bit more. I
fear that not everybody out there understands that web2.0 design
practices are to help your users to find easily/quickly/effectively
what they are looking for, syndicate the data easily, accomplish a
specific task easier etc. and if the page is aesthetically cool besides
this, even better - BUT not at the cost of sprinkling the site with
every kind of ‘in’ stuff just in order to have the features of a
‘typical web2.0’ site.

Regarding the ‘validate-ASAP/update buttons’ feature: For a certain time
i have been designing the GUI of a quite complicated software, and at
the beginning we addressed just these issues (instant validation, logic
of button enabling/disabling etc.). Our software had a web version too,
which (the original idea was, at least) was one-to-one translation of
the GUI to the web. Well, after both UIs were ready, in practice it took
at least 3x the time to accomplish the same tasks using the web client,
exactly because these things were missing - and everybody said, well it
is OK so, it’s just the WEB not SWING
- i.e. nobody even thought of
bringing the same power to the web client, since it was ‘just dumb HTML
inside the browser’ intstead of fancy SWING widgets based on a full
fledged MVC implementation . OK, it was 3 years ago, so it was a
different story, but still, i am glad someone is adressing this problem!

wrt the links:

Could not agree more. BTW, just in case you did not reed these related
links:

‘Cool URIs don’t change’
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

also related to this topic:

wrt everything else i did not address:
cool! :wink: I hope you will write posts often… Keep up the good work!

Cheers,
Peter