Website in a box

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:

  1. Those letters are commands
  2. The post box is the native host app
  3. 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.