Brendan Eich recently wrote: “The best way to help the Web is to incrementally improve the existing web standards, with compatibility shims provided for IE, so that web content authors can actually deploy new formats interoperably.”

Dave Shea nicely summarizes the conversation about web applications. “The recession is over, the slump is ended. Web development is in demand, and the demand is only going to increase.”

Patrick Breitenbach pointed me to General Interface, a company that has built a commercial windowing/UI system on top of DHTML allowing almost-rich-client-apps inside the browser. They lean a bit too heavily on IE-only features for now and the overall look is more like a rich client app than a web app (very much like Oddpost), but hey, it’s one way to do it.

Ben Nolan has a dusty library called phplive. “It’s event driven programming for the web – but the whole page isn’t refreshed – whenever you click a button, focus an element, or fire any event that has a handler on the server – an RPC call is dispatched to the server…”

Ian Hickson of Opera: “Our own position was that any successful framework would have to be backwards compatible with the existing Web content, and would have to be largely implementable in Windows IE6 without using binary plug-ins (for example using scripted HTCs). We were the only ones to even remotely suggest that the solution should be based on HTML.”

Espen Antonsen shares his wishlist: “As a web developer I find many tasks more time consuming and difficult to accomplish when building a web application – we develop a web-based ERP system.”

SysAdmin Week

I just wanted to announce that SysAdmin Week will hence be known as “SysAdmin Fortnight.”