Miscellaneous > Applications

the web has come far..

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piratePenguin:
Google Docs allows you to save to your harddrive. Indeed most office solutions should and they do.

The why of the web? Refalm mentioned one aspect. How about the ability to seemlessly access and edit all of your documents through one well-understood interface on your Windows work pc, your home mac or gnu/linux computer, your tablet, etc? Launch the URL and do what you need. How about the web is the most important information resource we have, and making it richer, while remaining very much backwards compatible whereever that's possible, will be an improvement making it simpler to create richer applications, while in fact making things faster? I basically think you're dissing the technology when you should perhaps turn your attention to the websites and web-developer decisions. The majority of professional web developers know too much about backwards compatibility in the sense of IE support and not in the sense of working on all types of configurations including super-slow computers (except mobiles), but you have to ask yourself what is their interest in putting resources into those configurations, but I think the efforts of those designing the technology are pretty much as substantial as they can be for keeping the web accessible to everyone, as is indeed one of the motives of the web originally.

--- Quote ---Just what we need, CPU-muching browsers that give us a slower, less useful, less worthwhile computer experience!
--- End quote ---
You can always use an old browser but in many cases this will not make your web experience faster! this is due to the momentous efforts by many companies at making JS become the fastest interpreted language it can be.

You can disable JS and there may be pages on the web that should work better for people who have JS disabled, but that's between those people and the websites - not the technologies of the web! (which are substantial in areas of compatibility and accessibility) HTML is still supported! In fact it's one of the only standards we can expect to be supported in 50 years time.

What about your Word files? What do you think those users are gonna do in 50 years time?

Gmail has a static interface option, other big email servers too. But other than that you have to ask where the demand for it is. Very few people do not use JS, I would argue that almost everyone bar people with serious resource limits should be turning it on.

Aloone_Jonez:
I agree with JJ that web applications are shit compared to real software. I'd rather use MS Word than Google Docs because it's faster and more streamlined. I don't think Google are going to fall any time soon but at least when a normal software developer goes under yo still have a copy of their software on your hard drive or can download it from a warez site.

However, I think JJ has missed the point about HTML 5 which is all about an open standard to allow web developers to do things which were only previously possible using proprietary platforms such as flash and multimedia codecs.

Talking of Java, why on earth hasn't any chip considered making a hardware accelerator?  Surely that's got to be the best thing speed-wise.

piratePenguin:
Who said Java? Do you mean Javascript?

I started looking into this a number of years ago and I believed I've written about it here, though I can't find my old posts. (Refalm, is there some display a list of threads started by a particular user?)

Anyways I'm sure that I found years ago hardware XML and/or XSLT parsers, doubt if they could be any addition except in mobile devices (optimized code running in our speedy cpus would seem to be faster) and btw they're not that important for the web since 99.9% of web content is html or html5 parsed.

I'm sure you'll get results for "hardware accelerated javascript" on google, it would seem like a huge task, and one that could be best undertaken by the huger chip manufacturers. I really think JS is becoming hugely important and hardware acceleration should be explored.  We are right now experiencing speed gains at the hands of all web-browsers in JS performance due to JIT and tracing (optimizing JS loops and methods for your cpu), but particularly for mobile devices hardware acceleration could be the best way to go.

However I thought you would have a better idea of how big of a task this is - it would seem gigantic, no? Especially with the way JS is hooked in with browser interfaces, I don't know how it would work.

Aloone_Jonez:
I admit I don't know much about Java script other than it's an interpreted language executed in a VM.

Yes, I imagine it's possible to make a Java VM in hardare inwhich case it would no longer be a VM but a real machine and agree that it will not be an easy task. All I can say is that, if you decide to take an electronics course, do a module on FPGAs, team up with some of your fellow students, write a hardware JS processor yourself and release it under a FOSS licence of course.

I've done a Google and most of the results are focused on graphics acceleration but Arm have such a technology.
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/jazelle.php

It would be cool to have Java code running at native speed.

Lead Head:
Anyone see Google's logo today? Some HTML5 goodness for you there.

I tried loading it up at school, and its amazing how much shittier it looks on IE8.

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