Web 2.0: Offline web apps

Gabor's blog observes that the problem of offline access to web apps will have to be solved before moving everything to browsers and web apps becomes feasible.

Larry Ellison and Sun's idea of a network computer was never realized because you don't always have a network. He hits the nail on the head:

"Display the UI in the browser, either by faking it or by actually running an application server locally."

Anyone who has fumbled around with dozens of complex GUIs like Java's Swing, Windows Forms, or the much easier Tcl/Tk which was the standard with Python for so long, has no doubt thought: Why not just use the browser as a GUI running off a local server (127.0.0.1) ? I do exactly that and it works.

Local servers are trivial easy to get going nowadays with EasyPHP, XAMP, or another version of WAMP or some other version of LAMP.

The idea of a collapsible network whereby offline you're using your local server and you connect to the internet via you local server as a proxy server seems viable. I'm just thinking economy of effort here. Assuming most people are lazy and have a lot of other things they coldbe doing with their time than mess around with the idiosyncracies of various GUIs.

I'd like to use DHTML plus Ajax and/or Flash as a GUI everywhere.