HTML FORMs, despite their glaringly obvious limitations as a UIMS,
are available to essentially anyone able to access the Web, whatever
platform they may use. That's a very valuable assumption, which
can't be made about X.
> I'm not flaming the Web here, all this just stems from the
> original design goals of HTTP, its statelessness in
> particular, and we have to be careful when shifting our goals.
Agreed. While the Web needs a way to handle stateful transactions,
such "session" capabilities must be added with *great* care.
Sessions are an optimization, and the optimizations suitable for
turning the Web into a global distributed software system are
different from those suitable for implementing a desktop UIMS. In
particular, because the Web has a larger client/server ratio than
your typical UIMS, the advantages of maintaining state on the client
side instead of the server increase in the Web setting.
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Paul Burchard <burchard@math.utah.edu>
``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
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