Computers are becoming exponentially more powerful. 
They used to be incredibly expensive, and humans (in 
comparison) nearly free. Now the tables are reversed: 
computers are nearly free and people are incredibly expensive. 
And yet we insist on using tools to address computers that were
 designed to make life easy for computers rather than people.

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Computers are becoming exponentially more powerful.  They used to be incredibly expensive, and humans (in comparison) nearly free. Now the tables are reversed:  computers are nearly free and people are incredibly expensive. And yet we insist on using tools to address computers that were designed to make life easy for computers rather than people.

The success of the Web has turned the browser into a central application area for the user, and you can spend most of your day working with applications in the browser, reading mail, shopping, searching your own diskdrive. The advent of applications such as Google Maps and GMail has focussed minds on delivering applications via the web, not least because it eliminates the problems involved with versioning: everyone always has the most recent version of your application. Since Web-based applications have benefits for both user and provider, we can only expect to see more of them in the future.

However, the approaches used for these applications don't address some fundamental needs for the web, such as accessibility and device independence.
And furthermore the approach comes at a cost. Google Maps is of the order of 200K of Javascript code. Such applications are only writable by programming experts, and producing an application is not possible by the sort of people who often produce web pages for their own use.

This talk discusses the requirements for Web Applications, and the underpinnings necessary to make Web Applications follow in the same spirit that engendered the Web in the first place.