« emacs emacs emacs | Main | Early and often »

The integration question for web apps

I don't agree with all of it, but there's some excellent ideas about the future of web app integration in this comment on Dave Hyatt's Surfin' Safari blog:

Might I suggest a more broad framework for web applications (http://www.ibiblio.org/jimray/blog/archives/000129.html)? WebCore is fantastic, but it can be so much more than just libraries to parse HTML and Javascript. Create a central repository for bookmarks, the web cache, cookies, preferences, and passwords locked on the keychain. Make it all open and build an SDK that third party developers can use. Make it all tie in to .Mac.

When I bookmark a site in Safari, it should be added to the WebCore bookmark file, then seek out an RSS file as well. That way, when I open up NNW, if an RSS feed is present, the site that I bookmarked is subscribed to in NNW. If I read a blog entry in Safari, NNW should be able to read the WebCore cache and know that I've already read it and mark it as read. When I go home, my computer should synchronize my WebCore bookmark files over .Mac. Or just synchronize a subset or bookmarks that I define. I should also be able to subscribe to other people's public bookmark files like iCal files.

This alone will help users feel like they're having a cohesive web browsing experience. Yes, they'll be using several applications to use the web, but they'll all be tied together. This is the most Mac-like approach I can conceive of.

Posted by Jim Ray at January 28, 2003 12:13 PM

This nails the whole "Sherfari" question IMHO. Instead of a uber-app, what is really wanted is the continuation of Unix and Mac tradition - small sharply-focused tools that can be deeply integrated to make aggregate tools. I really like the idea of being able to sync session state to .Mac. Also the subscription to bookmark files, though what I'm interested in is mainly bookmark synchronization. Without having to edit a central bookmark file somewhere - I want to be able to use key shortcuts when I'm running through a stack of pages that NNW opened for me.

What also might be interesting would be temporary bookmarks - bookmarks that I want up for a while, because I'm going to read them in the next few hours or days, but that I probably won't want around permanently. I often find stuff like this hanging round in my bookmarks menu months after I put it there. Designating a tempmark would keep it around for some finite period before it was purged from the bookmark file. Kind of like clearing /tmp, or the pre-System 7 Trash emptying at shutdown.