Document-centrism and Internet Based Applications
Posted on October 18th, 2005
Robin Miller's recent Newsforge editorial "Three reasons why Internet-based applications are a bad idea" is a nice complement to some ideas I wrote about previously regarding a simple blogging system that was oriented around documents created in a word processor. I've taken to calling that the document-centric approach to blogging. Miller mentions peering disputes, DSL lines getting accidentally cut, and unexplicable outages as three scenarios where having all your eggs on the Internet leaves you with a capable but largely useless computer sitting on your desk.
Certain things have to stay web-based and there will always be a level of inconvenience when your network connection goes away for whatever reason. But the novelty of web-based applications makes people more likely to take the fragility of their Internet connection for granted. It's the kind of thing you don't necessarily think about until it's broken, at which point it's probably too late to do anything but grin and bear it.
Barring a full blown power outage, there should still be a whole range of things you could do with a computer beyond video games, DVDs, music, and other avenues of entertainment. Document creation should be one of them. You may not be able to do anything with your documents until the network connectivity is restored, but at least you'll still have another option beside sitting in front of the compute twiddling your thumbs or playing solitaire.