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There is an explosion in applications that are essentially one website browsers. They talk to Netflix, Twitter or what have you via an API that can be anything from HTML screen scraping to SOAP and REST web services.

I think it would be a pain to have to have two websites to ask Twitter questions, one for those using MSIE, Firefox, Chrome, etc and one for TweetDeck, and other clients. Worse, things like browser plug-ins, Java applets, flash clients all kind of fall into a middle ground.

Worst of all, unless we give an IT IQ test to people asking questions, we are expecting them to know a lot about the inner workings of tools like browsers that use Twitter or tools like TweetDeck that also use Twitter, but use OS specific libraries and web APIs.

And what about Flock, those super browsers? If I use Twitter through that, I honestly couldn't say if it is a custom client or a web browser.

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  • +1 for the IT IQ test
    – Ivo Flipse
    Jul 5, 2010 at 5:51
  • Really tough question! I thought at first it was simple, but how do you define a standard browser? How do you say what is a "web view" as opposed to some other view? Argh. My head a splode!
    – x3ja
    Jul 6, 2010 at 4:23
  • This will probably sound stupid: Why is this question asked on meta, not on main side?
    – trejder
    Jan 16, 2014 at 11:04
  • 1
    @trejder meta is where you ask questions regarding the scope of permissable questions. So WebApps clearly includes gmail, facebook and twitter (because they are normally used with one of the big 4 browsers)-- when the Web Apps site was new, it wasn't clear if questions about TweetDeck (a non-big 4 browser app that uses the Twitter web API) is on topic or not.
    – MatthewMartin
    Jan 16, 2014 at 15:27
  • Great, and thanks for detailed explanation. But... shouldn't such question be now migrated to the main site, since this question hasn't been considered off-topic?
    – trejder
    Jan 17, 2014 at 13:17
  • I wouldn't recommend migrating since I'm not asking about any question in particular. I'm not like asking how to do function X with the Twitter API, its asking if for the purpose of this website, is the Twitter API paired with Tweetdeck a so called "web app"
    – MatthewMartin
    Jan 17, 2014 at 17:27

1 Answer 1

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Yes.

I think questions related to clients/extensions/plugins that work with web apps, where the general focus of the question is about using the web app are relevant to this StackExchange site.

See Jeff's answer to a related question here: Are questions about browsers appropriate?

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