A decade ago when Internet Explorer was the absolute winner in browser wars, it seemed to be cool to produce internet projects which pop up in new windows, hide the address bar, start playing favorite music, or change the color of scroll bars. There weren’t as many possibilities as nowadays, so I wanted to try all new flowers and butterflies and show them to others. But times and values changed. The standards of internet technologies were created, many new browsers were invented, new possibilities in phones and other devices were introduced. And so the web became a social phenomenon, the new lifestyle or at least helper for plenty of people. Different applications which had been installed on desktop computers, moved to remote servers. Nowadays web apps usually expose the full potential of the global network.
For better understanding, web apps are such applications which we use in internet browsers, for example, webmail, e-shops, auctions, wikis, or multiplayer online games. Recently, Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla wrote about good practices while creating web applications, regardless of the chosen technologies.
Clever URL addressing. The URLs should be organized in such a way that different parts of the web app could be saved as a del.icio.us bookmark or sent to a friend. For example, I know that when I enter http://mail.google.com/mail/#drafts, I will get to the Drafts of my google mail.
Sandboxes. The new users of the system should be provided with a safe demonstrative environment also known as sandboxes. They could test different functions there without breaking the important data. For example, PayPal has a sandbox for online merchants and CMS Made Simple has its demo version for potential users.
Browser apps should be used in the context of the browser. The buttons “Back”, “Forward”, “Refresh”, and “Stop” should function in the browser as well as the status bar, history, etc. The blocking of contextual menu or forced opening in a new window doesn’t add any protection against copying nor other value.
The apps should have inner structure that enables the features of the browser and it’s helping tools. The users should have an ability to manipulate the content or layout for their convenience: resize the text, search inside of a page, apply custom style or improve the usability by own scripts using either Greasemonekey (or similar plugin) or bookmarklets. The content of the web app should be indexable in search engines. Looking from the security perspective, all logic happening in the browser should be revalidated in the server.
Of course, most of those features can be applied not only to web apps, but also to social networks and to simple informative websites. We’ll see how everything evolves in the future, but at the moment the direction is clear: internet stimulate creativeness and openness. And I like it.
Tags: programming, web2.0
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