A Web 2.0 Problem

I just got done reading course notes for a Web 2.0 course. The notes were written by two Google employees, Joshua D. Mittlemen and Steffen Meschkat. The course notes were called Keeping the Web in Web 2.0: An HCI Approach to Designing Web Applications and the notes were well written.

The authors talk about various features involved in designing Web 2.0 web applications. They talk the benefits of designing web apps which using client side processing rather than server side processing. They also talk about the differences in browser implementations and their implementations of JavaScript. Even though the authors talk about the advantages of Web 2.0, they do mention that web page, which has Web 2.0 functionality, is dependent on: Browser implementation like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari; Browser version, and JavaScript library versions. I strongly believe that moving the data processing to the client side will make the web application more unreliable and it could become a system maintainability issue. This issue could be eliminated if various browser vendors like Microsoft, and Mozilla agree on the JavaScript implementation and not just on the JavaScript standard. This is a problem with various standards and a good example is the Java Messaging Service (JMS). Tibco's JMS implemenation is not understood by other vendors like Sun, Sonic and Bea and vice versa.