Sunday 2002.4.14
Who do I kiss?! | xsl:for-each-group... and "XSLT 2.0 introduces the ability for users to define their own functions which can then be used in XPath expressions." [XML.com] 
Gush | Julian Harris: "Oddpost is the first practical online web application with a desktop-quality user experience." [Scripting News]
That may be debatable but.. the reason you haven't seen many before is that usually our Requirements Specs almost always say something like "Must function and render identically on Netscape 4.03 and Internet Explorer 4 version browsers and above on both Windows and Macintosh".
Before anyone reads this the wrong way let me just say I think the Oddpost UI is an outright hoot, and I have no problem with the fact that it is platform specific (I'm a Mac user too), that's Oddpost's business decision and it's hard to argue why not for this kind of application - although I would have been screaming blue murder if it was an interface to a government service or access to my bank account.
With the advent of Web Services and XML, with Macromedia arguing that we should fuckoff HTML altogether and just use Flash MX, the maturing of CSS, DOM, SVG and browsers which will support them, with dotNet and handhelds and whatever else, We are going to see richer clients all over the place and more Web applications that don't even use the bowser. Now that there is no good reason for applications to be entwined in the spaghetti of presentation layer code the discussion about how to build the UI can be held with a new perspective. But it is not Oddpost's rich client that is flagging the "Internet User Experience 2.0" after all this implementation could have been done 2 years ago if our "business requirements" had allowed it, what will herald a truly new experience is when the application is client agnostic.
Soon if a service has no Mac interface I won't need to whine about it.. someone who thinks they can make a buck doing one will build it for me. It will also be THAT interface we will judge the quality of the service by. Who knows maybe service providers might get out of the GUI business... Will there be a new market for 3rd party GUI developers for these services?...
With this said; access and connectivity to knowledge and public information must be protected. It will be a terrible outcome if access is denied to people who cannot afford an expensive application or a computer with enough RAM to drive some over engineered interface or simply have "the wrong" browser. In the back of my mind I can't help worrying that things could get a little out of hand if we let them.
A lot of this may also fly in the face of what we have already learned... and we should bare in mind that the reason business had a requirement for universal access in their specs was that it made very little sense to business that they should forgo even a single customer or sale for the sake of a cooler user interface.
