Someone recently asked me to describe what I mean by:
“Website in a box”
Consider the following image:
It’s an old English post box.
If we think about the primary purpose of a post box, it’s to allow the general public to place letters (messages) inside a slot (message channel), while preventing any of those letters being retrieved by members of the general public once they’ve been placed into the slot.
Now imagine:
- Those letters are commands
- The post box is the native host app
- The website lives inside the post box
With this in mind from the developers perspective, we can only send commands to the website – the website has no real ability to respond.
As a result, this limits the interaction model between user and app, thus I effectively have a website in a box.