Longhorn the dump truck.

There's one flaw in Bray's latest rant, something like 99.99 percent of the people who use PCs use Windows PCs. That forces developers to opt for the trunk, to plow the mastah's field, if they like to be where the people are. Yes they like browser-based software, me too, but if they were editing their website for any length of time in the browser, they'd yearn for the good old days of WYSIWYG and spell-checkers (I spell really well, and would trade off wizzy for an outliner, and have). This is what the anti-trust trial was really about. Microsoft won't upgrade the browser the way Don Park says they will (see above) because that would help a free product cannibalize a for-pay product. They own both. We're about to yearn for the good old days of developing in a locked trunk, because we are now developing for a platform that's in the dumpster, and soon will be in the dump. At least the locked trunk was going somewhere. Of course, developers, idiots that they are, are fighting over bullshit instead of building something that's too big to fit in the dump truck.

[Scripting News]

I don't like writing in a browser too. Everytime I'm writing anything longer than a post, I use a text editor (usually BBEdit) and the cut and paste to the browser. It's sick.

For some time I've been using NetNewsWire to edit my weblog. Even without wysiwyg it was a better experience than the browser. NetNewsWire was connecting to my blogging tool (Radio) via some standard API.

I had to switch back to browser editing when I started using addtional tools on Radio, such as the k-collector client (which allows me to add topics to my posts) and recently a new trackback tool. We are trying to develop new software and right now the only infrastructure that allows us to create a GUI for it is the browser.

So here I am back in a text area, because current standards and software don't support new features as easily as a browser. But browsers are dead, there has not been any significant advance in browser technology for years.

The browser is comfortable for developers because it solved a lot of GUI problems. You can easliy add and remove stuff from your application and it will keep working looking relatively well. Current API and editors don't allow that (and I'm not sure that future ones will). The whole complexity of the world can be simplified to a title, a description and a link. We need new standards flexible enough to allow us to go further than weblogs, actually we need them to allow us to go wherever we want, in places we have not even started dreaming of.

But here we are, on one side a few huge companies, with lots of resources, controlling most of the environment, and on the other side a bunch of smart developers who are too small, too focused on their own agendas and probably too short sighted to get out from this situation.

It doesn't look very promising at the moment, uh?