Rails - Apr 2006 - [Article] Great Browser Expectations

Hey everyone,

I came back from Canada on Rails and was so inspired that I wrote an article 
on the plane.

http://unspace.ca/discover/expectations/

It''s my attempt to distill what I have learned so far, working on AJAX 
applications in Rails that people will hopefully want to use.

Feedback is appreciated!

Pete

> http://unspace.ca/discover/expectations/
[snip]
 
> Feedback is appreciated!
I haven''t had a chance to read the article yet but it''s open
in one of
my browser tabs.  I would like to think that if your site''s design
concept and use of typography is any indication, this should be a great
article.  Thanks for sharing.

Pete Forde wrote:
> Hey everyone,
> 
> I came back from Canada on Rails and was so inspired that I wrote an 
> article on the plane.
> 
> http://unspace.ca/discover/expectations/
Cool! I totally agree. Your site is a good example of the power of 
simplicity: i.e. you should have as much fancy web2.0 stuff (AJAX, css, 
DHTML, rounded corners etc.) as needed, but *not even a bit more*. I 
fear that not everybody out there understands that web2.0 design 
practices are *to help* your users to find easily/quickly/effectively 
what they are looking for, syndicate the data easily, accomplish a 
specific task easier etc. and if the page is aesthetically cool besides 
this, even better - BUT not at the cost of sprinkling the site with 
every kind of ''in'' stuff just in order to have the features of
a
''typical web2.0'' site.

Regarding the ''validate-ASAP/update buttons'' feature: For a
certain time
i have been designing the GUI of a quite complicated software, and at 
the beginning we addressed just these issues (instant validation, logic 
of button enabling/disabling etc.). Our software had a web version too, 
which (the original idea was, at least) was one-to-one translation of 
the GUI to the web. Well, after both UIs were ready, in practice it took 
at least 3x the time to accomplish the same tasks using the web client, 
exactly because these things were missing - *and everybody said, well it 
is OK so, it''s just the WEB not SWING* - i.e. nobody even thought of 
bringing the same power to the web client, since it was ''just dumb HTML
inside the browser'' intstead of fancy SWING widgets based on a full 
fledged MVC implementation . OK, it was 3 years ago, so it was a 
different story, but still, i am glad someone is adressing this problem!

wrt the links:

Could not agree more. BTW, just in case you did not reed these related 
links:

''Cool URIs don''t change''
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

also related to this topic:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/NOTE-chips-20030128/

wrt everything else i did not address:
cool! ;-) I hope you will write posts often... Keep up the good work!

Cheers,
Peter