Web authoring is a Tableau Server feature introduced in 8.0 that provides an interface for authoring that is similar to Tableau Desktop. Originally, the web-authoring interface was pretty limited, but more features are introduced with each version. Thus, the capability gap between the Tableau Server web-authoring environment and Tableau Desktop have shrunk. In Tableau 10, the web-authoring environment provides robust capabilities for creating and applying table calculations and also provides capabilities for creating dashboards, though the dashboard functionality is still fairly rudimentary.
As of this writing, some features are still missing altogether in the Tableau Server web-authoring environment. For instance, there is no interface for creating parameters or for connecting to data sources that have not already been published to Tableau...