Today I'm going to tell you that the Web is being used incorrectly by both its users and especially by companies hoping to leverage it for profit. Hopefully by the end of this post you'll believe me.
Let me first introduce the concept of a thin client, if for some reason you're reading this blog and don't know about them. Back in the day, computers were huge, expensive machines whose processing capabilities rivaled those of my pocket calculator. Individualized computers as we know them today were not possible. So we came up with a centralized computing model using machines known as "dumb terminals" or, more accurately, "thin clients". The thin client contains only enough hardward and software to accept user input and display feedback. Everything the user sees and does on the thin client is processed by a central server via a network rather than on the client itself. This was the cheapest computing model at the time, allowing each user to have his "own" computer, while not paying through the nose for computing power.
This was first done with the text-only screens of systems like IBM's
AS/400. Each thin client was just a monitor and keyboard, and text positioning and other information was handled by the central server. Since text computing is cheap (relatively), there was no reason to try and offload those calculations to the thin client itself. In more modern centralized computing models, such as a centralized
Solaris Unix environment, users demand a more robust graphical display and input capabilities. The modern thin client in this environment offers a keyboard and mouse as input, and runs a distributable graphical display system, such as the
X Window System. In this model, the central server handles the back-end computing of what the user wants, and the thin client handles the display, input and event processing.