User:JohnPritchard/Web operating system 3

The term Web operating system has been used to describe a network application system for integrating web applications into a web based work space. These systems may be better described using the terms Web desktop or Webtop.

The term also has been used in association with catalogued or finite wide area applications, as in for example the WebOS project at UC Berkeley. This use is complementary with that of others who have employed the term Web operating system as inclusive of countless numbers of heterogeneous services in a dynamic (ever changing) network.

Common to all uses, a Web operating system is distinct from Internet Operating Systems in that it is independent of the Operating system as the software abstraction layer over computer hardware.

Perspectives
People in the Operating Systems field may emphasize the term operating system with respect to metacomputing or distributed computing, where the term web may or may not relate to the HTTP protocol and XML (HTML) content format of the web. In some cases the term web is used to relate to a web of computers or a web of resources rather than the web as HTTP and XML.

People in the web technology field including Web services or Web 2.0 will most often use the term web to relate to HTTP and XML (typically as inclusive of XHTML and HTML).

Those who would emphasize web over operating system may object to a conception of the term web operating system such that one may be built, preferring instead its use in reference to a dynamic and inclusive collection of countless systems serving singular or wide area applications.

In most if not all cases, these application service protocols and formats are independent of any particular Graphical User Interface. In the case of web as in HTTP, this is the one of the principal distinctions separating Web 2.0 from Web 1.0.

Culture
The term Web operating system may be recognized as suggestive of the effect that large numbers of live Web Service applications may be expected to have on the computing world. As a whole they may be described as a force promoting a general shift in all applications away from single user computer concepts out into the multiuser network.