Application Types: Diffrent classes of websites for difference uses

Many online tools offer features catering to a use case, and these applications may operate with different modes. It’s not immediately obvious which is which, and harder still to disambiguate them when attempting to search any results. Some common and long-standing ways have become common. To list a few:

• n online - To find an online variant of a tool
• n desktop application - to find a desktop application to download
• n MacOs App
• n Android app
• …

However, these terms are becoming more dated as things evolve, with new technologies becoming available and more standardised ways of doing business are becoming evident.

Website Types

Important command types that are available to websites are as follows.

• Online web-to-server
• Online web-to-local context
• Online web to local filesystem
• Online web-to-tunnel

Each of these types offers different functionality and restrictions, and not all websites can offer all modes. The best type of application for a website is to offer all the available types. Since each type has its advantages and disadvantages, it can be good to let the user choose.

To illustrate the difference between a web-to-server and a web-to-local context type and show how it’s good to offer both types when possible. Let’s look at the process of compressing an image. It’s a task that I do just enough to care about and not enough to keep a full-fledged editor software on my computer. So I often find myself looking for an application to perform the conversion. While there are undoubtedly ways to perform such an operation using the features available on my operating system. I simply want a smaller image, so I Google for PNG compressor, I upload the file, and there you go, a smaller image. Hurrah, magic.

This method is great until you realise that you have just uploaded that picture to a server owned by a random developer. This can also be a problem when dealing with sensitive inventory or other legal requirements.

Web-to-server

With web-to-server the image is uploaded to a server, often just for the compressing of the image, but perhaps for other more malicious purposes. Instances of unwanted leaks have become commonplace in the world of generative AI prompts, with users uploading sensitive information without understanding that the terms of operating mean that any information may be used as training data. Which can cause the data to be repeated within the public domain. However, with web-to-server, it can also offer major improvements in all areas. For example, well-designed and operated websites offer service-level agreements that provide military-grade redundancy and much more.

Web-to-local context

With web-to-local context, the image compression is done in the browser sandbox. This means that the data (the image) is never transmitted to the origin domain(website). So there can be no leaks? Great, that sounds better. But it’s not all smooth sailing. Just like any website you are still using someone’s property, so it’s important to be aware of the terms of the service. In addition, using only the local context within a web browser can be much slower than using an industrial server, and runs on the electricity and computational limits of the machine executing it.

Web-to-local

Web-to-local application run on WASM and JavaScript engines within the browser to execute code, and utilise the Web Storage API to store data for next session locally.

The term local can mean multiple things:

• Storing within the filesystem of the device, meaning it access the operating systems filesystem like an applicaiton (with added permissions and restrictions).
• Storing within a context limited origin of the website, meaning only that website and its code can access the file storage objects.
• Storing within only the current browsing session.

Conclusion

Since it can be hard to tell a type from looking at an applicaiton, you must check the applications documentation.