>But how do you actually 'publish' a local HTML application? Typically you still need some sort of wrapper to actually display the HTML and get it started.

My hopes were on the way Chrome allows you to work with installable web apps.
Have only read about the technology, so I might overlook some problems:
There are 2 kinds of apps, hosted and packaged, each with a small manifest file and an icon file.
With the packaged app the HTML start form is included in the downloadable zip file.

>How do you deal with local data (offline storage isn't really an option for serious work).

(I saw your response to JohnR - this could have been written there...)
I had VERY high hopes for the HTML5 WebSQL after reading that gears would be discontinued
to concetrate on the HTML5 standard. Then one Firefox engineer somehow changed directions for the
API to support (because SQLite is not realy a standard) in FF
and MS was only too happy not to support it in IE (personal cynic opinion).

They want the browser app to be coded in ORM form and run against IndexedDB, which was hacked together
building on BerkleyDB (not sure if that is true for all implementations) by an Oracle dev.
IMHO it was not in the best interest of Oracle and MS to have a backend-agnostic client capable
of locally caching backend data - Honi suit...

Especially frustrating is the fact that FF already *uses* SQLite, but they feel it must "protect"
the web developers from an SQL API first on the grounds of "not enough standardization",
but also because of the better coding paradigm and "nicer aesthetics" - for me the ORM examples
look worse than the WebSQL examples - even trying to adjust for the existing personal bias ;-)

The above is written realizing that such local data is in greater security risk.

>JavaScript and HTML 5 in the browser are seriously hobbled by the browser's security sandbox.

And still open security holes...

>I'm not a huge fan of WPF/Silverlight with their extremely complex UI models.

Agreed that they are somewhat overengineered - but I was willing to take that in exchange
for MS having done a lot of the grunt work to test and debug on the other platforms.

>You can run a local Web server to make that work but then you're talking about messy config and maintenance that goes beyond the average user's tolerance IMHO - that's not a good solution either - not yet. I think that will come though and if you really try hard that can be done (in fact I've delivered an app like this with a hacked version of the Visual Studio Web Server Cassini built right into a small wrapper .NET app that that then uses a WB control to display the UI). It worked, functionally but it feels cheap to do it that way IMHO. I would not build a commercial tool that way.

Agreed on all points - and when you consider that most "other" Web tools offer some internal web server for such approaches, it is conceivable more such things will land on the phones: a security nightmare as well as cruel and unusual punishment for those ARM-CPU's if a couple of web servers run for different apps...

regards

thomas