Dominique on “Thin and dumb, or fat and smart?”

See Dominique’s Thin and dumb, or fat and smart?

Good to see the folks at the W3C Mobile Web Initiative Team understand the future, the importance of the convergence between browser-based and local clients, which is something I have been predicating for a while.

As Dominique, I believe the distinction between both will fade over time…

But today that is not the case. Browsing is fine for applications where browsing is sufficient, but for the rest, local access is needed — examples include mobile applications that must work without (or with minimal) connectivity to the Internet (yes, those requirements do exist), or there is a need to access the radio functionality (such as Bluetooth or NFC), or the camera, or the contacts information, and so on. Will someone come up with JavaScript libraries to accomplish such local access in a trusted way? Probably so; I’m looking forward to it.

Related to this see Jason on Playing Devil’s Advocate, and The Future of the Mobile Internet.

What are some of the characteristics that future mobile browsers must exhibit to make Mobile Web rich, highly-interactive, and able to fully exploit the handset’s capabilities? (Source: Mobile Web FAQ)

Provide full support to WICD Mobile specification.
Must provide access to native functionality via scripting (JavaScript), such as camera, messaging, Bluetooth, location, and other APIs that currently are available natively or via Java, and which will make the Mobile Web application rich. With this, there will be security and privacy implications that must be appropriately handled; will this translate to signed mobile web applications?
Support for disconnected or offline browsing (cache), allowing the Mobile Web application operate as an occasionally connected application.