Comments on: 20th International World Wide Web Conference – WWW 2011

By: Anil Madhavapeddy

Anil Madhavapeddy — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 14:41:19 +0000

> Objective-C -> LLVM -> Javascript

Stephen: see Cappuccino http://cappuccino.org/ ; it extends Javascript to Objective-J, with Cocoa-like bindings. It can target native iPhone (via Webkit) that is fairly indistinguishable from ObjC apps.

By: smh22

smh22 — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:52:39 +0000

I’m still a bit baffled as to why TBL is so keen on the semantic web – it seems to me that an attempt to build a single global ‘ontology’ (as they call it) is doomed to failure… seems perfectly sane in the context of e.g. computational chemistry, but not for general purpose. What’s wrong with per-user views enabled by customised search?

By: srk31

srk31 — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:22:13 +0000

The last point — that there is no solution for smart prefetching in the web — is a nice area for future work and definitely something that needs fixing. I’d claim that this is inhibited by the fact that the way the web names documents is broken. Embedding hostnames is just too location-dependent… I want something like DOI or pURL. (But I guess the official argument is that you’re just embedding a domain name, a.k.a. an authority not a location. So a very smart HTTP caching layer might do.)

I was also a bit confused about why wifi outage means that mobile apps win — since surely you can just use 3G on your phone to get to the web site. But presumably it’s the same issue — the app has preloaded all the data, so once you have it, you don’t need any connectivity at all.

The other point — which I guess not many people would want to put directly to Sir Tim — is that building a web site so that it’s accessible from a mobile device is Just Too Hard right now, so people fall back on writing mobile apps separately. Writing web apps is too hard in general, in fact. It would be awesome (and doable) if someone could hack the Android/iPhone SDKs so that they generate a web app (HTML, Javascript + whatever code is deemed to need running server-side) from an unmodified Objective-C (or whatever) codebase. Objective-C -> LLVM -> Javascript — sounds doable?

By: Salvatore Scellato

Salvatore Scellato — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 08:48:10 +0000

@hamed, just after that keynote there was some debate exactly on this point.
The organizers of WWW had provided an Android/Iphone application with
the full schedule of the conference and there was someone complaining
that the main Web conference should not provide mobile applications but
websites. Well, it turned out that

1 – on the first day the WiFi at the conference venue completely
failed, so the application was the only way to get information when
the “Web” was not working.

2 – the organizers had already a vast website, and the mobile app was
just an addition.

So the point is that we should actually use the Web and link everything
together and this is good. But as long as there will be connectivity
problems, having data physically residing on your phone it’s too
important.

By: hamed

hamed — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 08:41:19 +0000

guys, I wonder why Tim Berners Lee keeps on repeating the same thing: “we
shouldn’t make mobile apps, but web apps, so that we can keep things
on the web and link them all together.”?