The browser is dead. It's gone to meet its maker, shuffled off its mortal coil, and joined the bleedin' choir invisible. Macromedia knows this. Microsoft knows this. The makers of countless variations on the theme of the next-generation rich Internet client know this. Everyone knows this except the folks who build and deploy Internet apps. We surveyed them recently, and they told us last-century Web apps are not only alive and kicking, but dominant. Is that nostalgia, or a leading indicator? Both, I suspect. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
John Dowdell wonders why I led this article the way I did. It was intended ironically. I don't in any way think the browser is dead.
In related news, Derek Robinson wrote to point out that MSIE does indeed have an analog to Mozilla's W3C DOM Traversal and Range API, called TextRange. Neither of these technologies has seen much use, judging by the paucity of Google results for msie textrange and dom traversal range. I don't know. Maybe I'm just swimming against the current here, but the ability to lift a well-formed XML object right off a web page strikes me as remarkably useful.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/10/11.html#a825