Pinderkent

I just finished reading Marcus Cavanaugh's recent The Cross-Platform Myth article. The first two-thirds or so of it are quite correct. He points out that when an application is developed for two or more desktop environments that differ in some pretty fundamental ways, like Windows and Mac OS X, the result usually isn't too great. The app likely won't fit in well on one or more of the platforms, which can lead to usability problems, and may even result in users not adopting the software.

At the very end of the article, however, he writes the following:

The only acceptable cross-platform UI toolkit lives in your web browser. If you want your application to work on both Windows and OS X, create a web application. In the browser, you can freely design a custom user interface that won't seem out of place on any operating system. Users understand that web sites operate under different rules.

I find this reasoning quite absurd. First of all, Web browsers are some of the worst-conforming desktop applications around. Early in the article, he even mentions Mozilla Firefox as an example of a cross-platform application that just doesn't fit in anywhere. But Firefox isn't the only browser guilty of this. The Windows port of Apple's Safari Web browser clearly doesn't behave like a typical Windows app, either. And to some extent, the same even goes for Opera.

So not only are Web browsers themselves perfect examples of UIs that target the lowest common denominator, but the environment that they present is that very same philosophy taken to the extreme. The only consistency is that there's inconsistency. The built-in UI controls or widgets are extremely limited. And everyone who has even had to do a minor amount of Web development knows that the environment differs significantly between the different browsers.

When it comes to Web applications, it's not that they "won't seem out of place on any operating system." Rather, it's that they won't fit in with any existing desktop environment. In a sense, Web applications are typically so horrible in that respect that most users can't even recognize how bad these applications are. For some odd reason, users tend to use confusing, inconsistent or poor-quality Web applications far longer than they would the desktop equivalents.

The situation likely won't improve. Like Marcus mentions in a footnote in his article, RIAs only make the bad situation even worse. They allow for further inconsistency in an already inconsistent environment. And the other "innovations" we are seeing are just poor attempts to bring existing desktop application concepts within the browser. The canvas element and O3D are good examples of this. They both pale in comparison even to the cross-platform, desktop-equivalent abstractions of libraries and APIs like wxWidgets, GTK+ and OpenGL.

In fact, the Web development community has even gone so far as to try and abstract away the variety of programming languages we have available with a typical desktop environment. We are stuck using JavaScript, which ends up bringing us the worst of all worlds, like the Web application development environment itself.

All in all, those of us who have developed real desktop applications for years and year end up being quite disappointed with what Web development offers, or more correctly, all that it doesn't offer. We've thrown out everything we learned during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, only to replace it with half-baked, browser-based "alternatives" over the past decade. We've essentially taken a huge step backwards, amplifying the very problems that Marcus spoke out against during the first part of his article.