[PKingDuct]

Originally Posted by EtherealRemnant

The internet is a lot more than browsing.

I'd say over 80% of all websites on the internet have a place to login somewhere.

Ajax is everywhere.

I'm really not going to get into it but the only thing that downloading this at this stage is going to be good for... is bragging rights. Nothing else.

And then as you all go along and start activating multiple devices with the same keys, you're going to kill off those keys too.

I strongly agree that you need to have more support than basic html to use the web.

What you also should mention is that Javascript is used extensively -- more so than Ajax. Many sites base their page navigation on Javascript. A lot of Javascript activity is invisible to the user - posting the current date, opening a new window, displaying a warning on incorrect form data, etc. that people often don't realize that their pages are full of Javascript. The fact that Pocket IE didn't support Javascript or Ajax crippled Pocket IE -- it's more than a WAP browser but can't display or navigate many HTML/Javascript sites. Microsoft should be addressing these issues as the base functionality of the preview release, not trying to out-GUI Apple's demos.

Real-time zooming and panning is a gimmick that has historically been used to grab software customers attention (I've seen demos focusing on nothing more than real time zooming and panning going all the way back to the engineering workstations of the 1980s!)

Besides, the 'click on the thumbnail view' methodology in Deepfish has a fundamental flaw -- many times, even the largest headline text on the thumbnail view is too small to read in order to select a region to zoom-in. You might as well just throw a dart at the thumbnail to select a zoom region. This methodology works great in navigating a map (such as Live Search or Google Maps) because even a small map thumbnail contains enough information for a user to make an accurate initial selection (it's much easier to view major highways on a thumbnail view than it is to view 2-pixel headlines in a thumbnail view.)

The second problem with Deepfish is that often when you zoom-in to read a column of text, the selection box misses and cuts off the right (or left) side of the column. The next zoom-out increment is too large and ruins the visibility of the text in the column. If you can't automatically fit the column width into a zoom-in view, you're left with a flashy demo that doesn't provide better functionality.

Check out the Minimo .2 thread (yes, Minimo development has been restarted). Those guys have gone in the opposite direction of Deepfish - no impressive zooming, but lots of functionality in their release.