While I agree that keeping web pages simple is ideal, without all the Flash-enabled garbage slowing things down, adding basic desktop functionality to a site makes perfect sense, especially when you review the drag-and-drop shopping cart app on Scriptaculous. That’s a very simple implementation, and very intuitive to the user. This has great potential, not only with shopping apps but in the social networking space as well. And to be honest, if you are going to use Javascript to provide progressive enhancements to your site, you would also provide a separate version for users who do not have Javascript available. For example, the user with Javascript turned off has a normal shopping cart experience. Those with it turned on have the drag-and-drop features. This functionality doesn’t take very long to implement, since the libraries are already provided for you. I’m adding some of these features to my own site, and its not a time-consuming endeavor. Simplicity is good in many cases, but I think we need to start thinking about better improvements to the user experience to draw more traffic to our sites, and these are excellent ideas for doing so.

I sat down and watched a user use a desktop email application and when I asked why they didn’t drag their messages into other folders, the response was, “What do you mean drag?”

It was an eye opener to say the least.

My suggestion is to sit down with non-techie users and see how they interact with their machines. You’d be very surprised.

I’m enrolling in classes this fall that pertain to this very subject and its good to see these intro / idea building articles. Variety is good. So, job well done.

@Isreal
I would agree that simplicity is important. However, the idea of dragging items into folders or minimizing panels/windows is a simple and familiar task for most users.

@LiQ
Sorry, my bad. I should have been a bit more thorough with the initial post with samples and screen caps. As far as cross-browser support goes, most of the more popular javascript libraries, JQuery, Dojo, Scriptaculous, are pretty solid.

I agree with above, what about keeping it simple? Spending hours and hours developing flashy interfaces and suddenly it’s all spoiled by a browser with turned off javascript.

Or something bigger like cross browser incompability, javascript-function turned off in big browsers because of security issues (or whatever) or, as allways, different behaviour from javascript between different browsers.

Gmail, Netvibes and lots of other big Web 2.0-pages behaves different between IE and Firefox.

I can put together a few code samples. In the meantime, there are a few good tutorials to get started on at Scriptaculous.