Where I work, we have deployed a number of web-based applications and desktop-based application. Customers (internal ones) usually prefer web based applications, because:
- The look and feel is consistent (they already know how to use a web browser)
- They load fast
- Pages are "simpler" and easier to understand
For us, this means:
- No versioning hassles (ever tried to manage a project made oh hundreds of separate DLLs that depend on each other and are on a client that breaks 1,000 miles away?)
- No low-level hard-to-debug errors (the client breaks, leaks memory....)
- Shorter developement times
- Less 'layers' and less moving data back-and-fort
Before starting the project, anyway, we designed a very simple widget tolkit that we use to handle HTML data (things like a scrollable table you can select rows on, a hierarchical tree object, a currecy control...) and then designed the pages to be simple: no (or very few) Javascript on-page events, you always press a button to perform an action, and so on. This means we almost forget HTML in coding and both layout and behaviour are always consistent.
What you should not do, instead, is to say 'HTML is simple - let's embed it here and there'. This produces a mass (or a mess?) of unreadable code that will be very hard to mantain and understand when the project's over (when you have three or four nested tables, whose TD is that?)
My 0.02 euros
