Great post!

It has an eternal place on my favorites! I love this post because I've ran into the same problem but in my case it was the other way around: my boss started to ask things that:

1) The site couldn't do
2) The site could do, but it would be too complex and time consuming to develop

And this is exactly where many people make mistakes: unfortunately a web based app CAN'T do everything a desktop app can.

Quote: non-IT persons have a bigger control here.

So, non-IT persons don't have the knowledge to know what they can and what they can't deploy in a web app.

So, non-IT persons usually make crazy requests to the webdevelopers.

So, since they have such control, non-IT persons don't like a "no can do" for an answer...

Pretty sad, I must say.

I have a practical case that I would like to share with you:

I've been asked several times if I could make a form field of a web page to have an "autocomplete" feature, like the address bar of the web browsers. For an example, I have the field "Monks" and I type "da" and then I get on my page a combobox with DaWolf and davido.

My answer to this? YES and NO. YES, it could be done by JavaScript (believe me it's not THAT hard), but NO, it wouldn't work out.

Why? Because when you deploy web apps you must consider at least two things:

1) Bandwidth, both server and client side. You must have a good bandwidth on your hosting service and the client must have a fast connection.
2) The client's machine. It must be decent.

If you miss one of these points - and believe me, there's no possible way to be sure about them today - things will go wrong. For an example, the client's machine slows down and he/she pushes the submit button or worse the reload button over and over. Can you imagine the nightmare?

So, web apps have several limitations as well as several advantages.

In my humble opinion, some things are better on the web, others are better on the client's desktop.

Just my two cents.

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