Web 2.0 needs Adobe
JavaScript and HTML aren’t enough to bridge the desktop/mobile divide It’s thrilling to imagine rich, responsive, attractive client applications that run identically on desktops, notebooks, and mobile devices, as well as over remote connections. Java promised us that. Then .Net. Neither really came through with the kind of transparency and interoperability that Sun and Microsoft had led us to expect. Now, it looks like we’ve given up on commercial interests closing the application portability gap. Web 2.0 is touted as the way of applications to come, and on the face of it, it’s all about standards. We don’t have to wait for Microsoft, Sun, Symbian, or anyone to do next-generation software for us. All we need is a browser. We’ll do it ourselves. I wish. A browser should be the perfect place to host an application. Standards such as HTML, DOM, CSS, JavaScript, JPG, WAV, PNG, XML, and MPEG are wired into every Web browser of note on every device that can possibly connect to the Internet. You should be able to take even a relatively demanding application — say, a unified messaging client — and run it on anything with a browser. But you can’t. Once you try to… READ MORE