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As for the document as the centric model, maybe. For hypermedia in general, maybe not. Hypertext was never more than embedding a link control inside the text itself. The rest of the thingies are bits and pieces from other technologies. I look at XForms and remember the firestorm of critique over the US Navy MID design from the HTML community that was pretty darned clueless about why such designs were sponsored and I think, it's just timing and requirements. XForms takes the same tack, adds web spaces, and voila, MID lives. Most of what I see today is a recycling of ideas either copied or rediscovered and implemented over the web substrate. In that sense, the web has succeeded in providing an infrastructure and the only question is will the middle hold once the retooling of the lower layers gets into high gear. Web services are not exactly a new idea, but when implemented in a decent framework, are an advance. They also present a dilemma in that with them, the local IT department that was being relegated to the waste bin of non-essential personnel suddenly gets a shiny new cube. With web services, the IT department can now compete well with the third party application system vendor by virtue of local mastery of the subject domain and the office politics. Some of our locals are very surprised that our customers having discovered ASP and ODBC are accessible and with code cloning, eminently learnable, and are going around our marketing guys to do their own thing. The VB model of hypermedia is still a very potent one if the web service APIs are implemented at the level of organizational forms and the negotiation doesn't go deeper than a sharable schema. By 1990, the advanced thinkers in the CALS groups had published that global integration was not a document-centric issue, but one of better object frameworks for supporting the sharing of documents and processes (the old PPO model). Better frameworks are emerging but we had to repeat the cycle of development at a much larger scale (the WWW replicated most of CALS along the way). Part of that was infrastructure development and part of it was a learning curve amplified to a very high volume. No not all of the solutions arrived at now were known by the HTML community, but so far, very little done there surprises me or looks new. Shinier, better implemented, etc., but not terribly new. I have this sense that the windowing metaphor itself, the mouse click, etc, in other words, Englebart's work, are a pattern that gets reproduced at larger scales but essentially limits how far the document-centric approach can evolve. len -----Original Message----- From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@r...] On Tuesday 22 January 2002 04:01 pm, Simon St.Laurent wrote: > I don't think we've begun to address the possibilities of XML's > relatively easy 'lexical' level, so I'll leave semantics to the rest > of you brave warriors. Hmm. I've been feeling kind of like we threw the baby out with the bathwater recently... XML was originally supposed to offer better text/hypertext features to the WWW, but we seem to have missed that point...
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