On Saturday July 21st I had a nice conversation with Caleb Clausen about web applications. HTML and the web was originally designed for document delivery, not interactive applications that we are using today. Certain features such as vertical layout, thus, were not incorporated into the fundamental design of web pages. This makes it challenging to create web applications that use window space effectively. Also, drawing a non-horizontal line without using HTML 5 (i.e., scalable vector graphics) is difficult. Given the popularity of older non-compliant web browsers such as Internet Explorer, there is not much choice but to hack websites until they look right.