The Web Interface Should Be Radically Refactored

  • John (JD) Douceur ,
  • Jon Howell ,
  • Bryan Parno ,
  • Michael Walfish ,
  • Xi Xiong

Tenth ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-X) |

Published by ACM SIGCOMM

The Web API conflates two conflicting goals: serving developers by supporting a wide and growing suite of functionality, and providing applications with an isolated execution environment. We propose to split the API into two levels of interface: a low-level interface that governs the relationship between the application and the browser, and a set of high-level interfaces that govern the relationship between the application and its developer. We delineate a tiny set of properties needed by the low-level interface. We argue that this restructuring provides significant benefit to both developers and users.