Rails creator, David Heinemeier Hansson, has placed an opinion on the 37signals blog that leaves me wondering if it is a late April Fools joke or real commentary. This is not because the post itself is a joke — listening to DHH is usually a good bet — it is mostly because of its timing and proximity to April 1st coupled with April 1st-style comment reactions.

The entire post is worth a read, but there is one bit I would like to highlight, because it matches much of the view online today. To quote:

“The idea of offline web applications is getting an undue amount of attention.”

The key here is the phrase “offline web application” and when considering the implications of that phrase, DHH’s assertion makes sense — who cares? This isn’t to say that bandwidth is ubiquitous, but rather that a so-called offline web application doesn’t make much sense. An adjustment of terms and perspective might prove helpful in this regard.

In my admittedly biased opinion, it shouldn’t be about taking a web application “offline” or taking a desktop application “online” for that matter. Web applications are a user experience compromise. Desktop applications are a user experience compromise. Why would anyone want to bring the compromises of one paradigm into the other?

I think Brent Simmons got it right with NetNewsWire and its online companion and I hope to see, use, and build more of these hybrid applications. It isn’t about taking something online or offline. It’s about not compromising user experience.

Simmons mentioned the difficulty of syncing these two different worlds in his C4 appearance and I agree that it is a hard problem to tackle, but in the end I think it is a win for users. Someday we’ll lose these primitive ideas of apps running on this or that machine, or being online vs. offline, but right now, I think the answer is to put in the extra work, build both, and sync where appropriate…at least for ToDo lists and probably for many other domains.