On the other hand, the *lack* of a standard WIMP GUI toolkit for web pages has also let loose a few creative ideas for what a UI could be. The standard desktop GUI toolkits make it easy to write mediocre and somewhat boring UI's that get the job done but not very elegantly or ergonomically, and which all look exactly the same.

Web apps are not really a blank slate... but they could be close once you decide what parts of the HTML/browser framework you intentionally *don't* want to use and step around.

(HTML5's Canvas is also more literally a blank slate... so will be interesting to see what happens with that.)

Check out Google Web Toolkit or Pyjamas.

Want to give a clue as to what "Drumbeat" is, and maybe some kind of link that looks like it might explain what you're talking about? (A Computerworld article about "the threats have changed" doesn't help.)

Here's one: http://www.interreality.org/about ; http://interreality.org/wiki/VipDocumentation . Project is dormant for the past couple of years but could pick up again if there was interest.

Thank you, this is very insightul. We really do need to be careful about what we are claiming an online virtual world (VW) can and cannot do.

One role I do see VWs being good at is simulation of *processes*, if not specific physical skills -- processes of communication, sequences of action, decision making, etc. A high level simulation like this can present students with a set of circumstances on a more abstract level, to let them figure out how they might deal with it in RL. When it comes to learning how to actually do exams, surgery, whatever, you then certainly need to get into a real hospital.

This is how the armed forces have been using "games" of various kinds (just recently using computer games) for a long time-- to try out and practice strategic and tactical possabilities.

In a large scale world (like SL), you can even try to model lots of aspects of a complex system like a hospital, everything from scheduling of shifts and personel assignment, to how supplies and medications are stored, ordered, transported, and delivered, to physical layout of the rooms and placement of machines, phones, whatever, and more, and see how they interact.

But we need to remember always SL is *not* Virtual Reality.

Only if the user has correctly configured his system to know the correct physical resolution (dpi) of the screen, or the OS was able to get correct information from the screen automatically (DDC); this will only be true for some users.

The only real valid arguments I've ever heard for using metric are that (a) it's easy to learn the conversions, and (b) everyone else uses it for all science and egineering.

(b) is the reason that NASA should just use metric... And anyone else in the world doing any kind of science or engineering.

But for everyday life, imperial or American units turn out to have a lot of utility that most people aren't aware of, because most of us of the younger generation have just relied on calculators doing decimal calculations for us most of the time. If instead you picture fractions in your head, imerial or American units are quite handy. They also often match real world objects a bit closer. If you're dividing meters into centimeters, you can really only talk about tenths, hundreds, etc. If you're dividing yards into feet and inches, or pounds into ounces, etc. you have thirds, 16ths, 12ths, and all kinds of other useful fractions to use to think about the divisions. Find a carpenter who is good at this to see what I mean. Same with volume and weight; if you do a lot of cooking and modifying quantities in recipes you can get good at those conversions.

The number one slowdown I see on pages is linking to all kinds of external resources: images, flash movies, iframes, CSS, bits of javascript. Each of these requires at least another DNS lookup and a new HTTP connection, and often those external servers take a really long time to respond (because they're busy doing the same for all those other websites using them). Why is this going on in each users browser? It should all be done behind the scenes on the web server. Why would you put the basic user experience of your users or customers in the hands of random partners who are also doing the same for competing sites? It takes some load off your server, but I think the real reason that people just link in external resources as images, objects, etc is just that it's easier than implementing it in the back end. If you really want to offload work, then design a mechanism that addresses that need specifically.

We've ended up with a broken idea of what a web server is. Because it was the easiest way to get started, we now seem to be stuck with the basic idea that a web server is something that maps request URLs directly to files on the server's hard disk that are either returned as is or executed as scripts. This needs to change (and it is a little bit, as those "CGI scripts" have now evolved into scripts which are using real web app frameworks.)

The "Entertainment Industry" seems to think that the Internet was created just for them. It happens to be useful as a user-friendly distribution channel for media. That doesn't mean that you guys get to suddenly control it! Sorry!

Note that just because correlation is not causation, doesn't mean that correlation is not important...

In Communist Cuba, *you* control operating system!

Well it's not so much that AJAX is a web only thing, it's just that outside the restrictions of the browser's Javascript environment, i.e. in any general purpose programming language with networking libraries, it's just nothing special... just another use of networking. It's special in the web world because anything requiring that you make a request was just impossible until the ability to do so was added to the main browsers' Javascript APIs, and because the application is narrowly defined to showing HTML pages.