Make web a software development platform?

The reason for me to write in English is that I want to give a link to this note to Joel.

Joel Spolky has written an article discussing features that a software developer, not a graphic designer, would want web (web-browsers) to support. One of them was:

Javascript features to do fast REST queries back to the server, so I can implement things like a lush spell checker with the dictionary on the server. It should be possible to have a 300,000 employee directory on the server and create a web app that has a list box where you can type the first few letters of an employee’s name and see a filtered list as fast as you can type on the screen.

I don’t know what REST is (shame?) but anyway it sounds crazy to make something communicate with server as fast as you type locally. I believe things like dictionaries must be built into the OS (anyway everybody has them with Office, why not make them easily available to any application?) Slowness of client-server communication is not a problem of web, it’s problem of the Internet. Look at things like ICQ or RSS feed readers: they are not «as fast as you type». In ICQ, it takes some 2 or 3 seconds to deliver your message... Well, maybe it’s just Russia here.

The DC idea is something that came into my mind first time I saw HTML (5 or 6 year ago, I didn’t know the term «DC» that time). I was very surprised with absence of things like <line>, <rectangle> and so on; I still have to use gif’s for all this. And today when we have filters in IE which almost makes it a Photoshop we still don’t have canvas (or do we?) Well, to my opinion it’s more important for graphic designers than for software developers.

But all this takes us to making the same thing which, as far as I get it, Microsoft is trying to bundle with Longhorn. Do we really need that? I mean, if today we get web standards for application development and tomorrow Microsoft comes with its XAML and god knows what else, are we going to learn again? Or are we going to ignore Microsoft’s technology (and lose 90% users)? Or does anyone think Microsoft will implement both XAML-and-so-on and these highly wanted web standards? I, personally, don’t.

So I think we have to wait for Microsoft to ship Longhorn, see what it is, and decide whether we like it or need something else. And if we like it, there’s no other way for Opera Software and Mozilla.org than to suggest it web standards and make it work in their browsers.

Oh, my list of need-them-most features is not ready yet. Looks like Joel has listed everything we need.