11 Oct
2011
11 Oct
'11
6:02 a.m.
On 10/10/11 9:13 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Actually, I'd argue that the proliferation of pixel-precise layout strategies
like CSS2/3 proves the opposite, that people want low-level control over
layout and design in an interface. Otherwise, if we wanted a purely
utilitarian way of accessing resources and services over a network, we'd
be using Gopher++. Not that I'd mind that. :)
CSS was always designed to be a separate component which can be omitted,
so you can choose to micromanage or not.
And you can render HTML content to a console if you want.
Yes, some places it never left, or did come back, to some extent. But I
don't see it sweeping in as a dominant model - ignoring the web, of
course. Smaller clients such as netbooks, tablets, smart phones arguably
make the web look more of a remote computing service.
Now we have web browsers where the heavy lifting is done remotely and
pushed to a thin client (Opera Mini, Amazon Silk), and work is also
being done on streaming video for compute-heavy game graphics to devices
which are too small to render it realtime themselves. That could end up
being a popular model, even if it sounds odd at first, being such a
reversal of the "buy the biggest PC and graphics card you can" model.
None of the long haul uses X11... Sorry Dave.
--Toby
Further, that low-level "mechanism, not
policy" architecture of X is one
of its big points of existence. An X display can look and act like
ANYTHING.
And that's the problem. For most uses, the detailed design of widgets
doesn't matter. You just want a CHECKBOX here, a TEXT field here, and a
SUBMIT button there. Good enough for Amazon, at least, which is a
non-trivial UI. Plenty of other examples too. Remote computing on a intranet is interesting,
less wasteful than big
desktops, but it hasn't exactly thrived as a model. For it to do so,
would resuscitate the idea of a "workgroup" or "departmental" server
with enough grunt to virtualise desktop apps.
I don't know where you work, but in the major hospitals I work for as a
physician, I'm connecting via Citrix to a remote server where I enter my
charting. The dummy terminal is back.