Comments on: Less bloat, more oxygen

By: William Vambenepe’s blog » Blog Archive » Oracle/BEA, WS-Management and MMS: announcements of the day

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:13:55 +0000

[...] marketing contractor) is using the same clueless HTML design approach that I first saw in 1995 and recently wrote about. All the text in the center of the MMS home page is contained in one large picture (available [...]

By: William Vambenepe

William Vambenepe — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:35:20 +0000

Hi again Tom. You seem to assume that most sites need the kind of features that require either RIA or some advanced AJAX. They don’t. Look at the JM Jarre site for example and tell me. In your professional judgment is Flash a good implementation choice for the site?

If you say “yes”, then we have narrowed down our disagreement. It has to do with the value we each put on accessibility (how accessible are you Flash apps to blind users?), speed of access to info (on what planet does a Flash app load faster than an HTML page?), re-usability (how could one create mash-ups based on Craigslist data if it was a Flash-based site? You can’t even copy/paste from those things!) versus graphical richness and animation of actions.

If you say “no” then we may not be that far apart after all. If you indeed only use Flash where there is a need for complex interactions (e.g. photo editing) then I am a lot less sanguine about Flash versus AJAX. With all the browser incompatibilities, advanced AJAX can be a real hassle to deal with compared to the relative uniformity provided by Flash. I am not against RIA toys as much as I am against their overuse. But frankly, the overuse is so prevalent that it is almost indistinguishable from the base tech by now.

And remember, I am looking at this from the user’s point of view, not the developer.

By: Tom Van den Eynde

Tom Van den Eynde — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:11:11 +0000

William I don’t understand why non-RIA would be cheaper - especially when looking at Adobe Flex - to me AJAX is not RIA :). I know from experience that you can develop way faster in Adobe Flex compared to the hacking you need to do to build a decent (I’m not talking about some small online registration form) application using HTML/Javascript/AJAX. Flex is faster in development, the end result looks better and brings a better user experience…

By: Cote'

Cote' — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:12:44 +0000

I remember server side image maps. I even did a few of those way back when. I was wondering what ever happened to them and client-side ones.

By: William Vambenepe

William Vambenepe — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:59:42 +0000

Hi Tom. If you want to use the car comparison, I’d say that RIA is the Hummer of Web technology. There are a few tasks for which a Hummer is the right tool but 99% of the time they are used where a sedan or a minivan would be better and cheaper.

By: Tom Van den Eynde

Tom Van den Eynde — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:13:27 +0000

Yeah - let’s keep building web applications that simply s*ck and waste peoples time. Let’s keep on using (D)HTML, Javascript and AJAX. Sorry - we go by car now, we’re not in the Flinstones timeframe anymore :) Wake up please.