Web applications
There's a shift in the world at the moment towards Web Services and Web applications. However, it just occurred to me quite clearly one feature that even something like Gmail doesn't have: ad-hoc interoperability.Particularly on the Mac, the ability to drag-and-drop is important. I can attach an image to an email by dragging it in, either from another application or as a file. Web applications simply can't do this — they're constrained by the browser. Imagine dragging an image (or, more semantically, a person) from one Web app to another… not today.
This is a manifestation of a more general issue: interoperability. In principle, by assigning a URI to particular items and operations in a RESTful way, Web apps can interoperate. However (and this is the big thing) it's not easy for the end user, and it's not ad-hoc.
The former: at the moment, if you want to add an image from some place on the Web, you need to provide the URL. Not “the picture” (the entity), but some text string. Non-intuitive*. The obvious response is to wire things up behind the scenes; using Web Services, Gmail could allow you to pick one of your Flickr pictures to attach to an email. This is the second point: if you want to add an image from JoesImageSite.com, the Gmail developers have to have wired it in, or you have to do more work (perhaps entering the URL to JoesImageSite's browsing WS).
In conclusion, there is no infrastructure in place for Web applications to support ad-hoc interoperability without getting down to very messy textual URLs. This is very dangerous; we're only just moving away from the “data island” model on the desktop — I am, at least in principle, now able to drag contacts from Address Book to Entourage — and Web apps present a very significant risk of hampering this.
So, what's the solution? Well, my preference is for local wrappers around Web services. Fine, have Flickr and Del.icio.us and Gmail with Web interfaces, but make them accessible to “proper” apps — and this is exactly what's already happened, with 1001, all the Del.icio.us clients, and Gmail's POP access. But we need some way of allowing these to interoperate, too: they are often focused around Web Services, but local interop approaches such as DND aren't aware of these things; i.e. if I drag a picture out of one of these applications, it's copying the image data, not the conceptual object of the picture on the photo service. Maybe Semantic Web Services will help…. Anyway, enough rambling. Man, I need an editor!
* Even drag-and-drop in browsers wouldn't be enough — you still need a place to accept whatever's being dragged, and it's going to be a text field.
Apologies, Tim — I actually was going to bed, but I just had an idea, and had to write!
Posted at 2005-01-08 17:29:28 by Richard • Link to Web applications
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