And as a side note, I hope the trend towards web-based applications comes to an end soon, at least as far pure HTML-based solutions are concerned. While they are obviously much easier to deploy and maintain, the user experience with a "fat" client is much better, I think. Maybe Java applets or XUL can improve this somewhat.

First of all, it depends whether you're talking about all applications that use the web as a delivery mechanism or only those that use HTML/CSS/Javascript for their interface. For the former, I don't see that going away any time soon, nor should it. Someone may propose a better mehanism, but no one has that I've seen.

For the latter, I agree with you that an open, portable platform for delivering rich client interfaces on the web would be very nice. XUL has the potential, but the market has not yet borne it out. But I don't think the current picture is so bleak that we need to either sit around waiting for this change to happen, or give up and start writing ActiveX controls in Visual Basic. The fact is, innovation in user interface design with dynamic HTML is not dead. Just look at Google: in both Gmail and Google Suggest they've built creative new interfaces using only standard web techniques, and in Google Desktop they've demonstrated the viability of using embedded web servers as a tool for desktop apps.

In reply to Re^2: Perl 6 and trend towards web-based applications by Errto
in thread Perl 6 and trend towards web-based applications by kiat

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.