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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XDocs and XForms?
 That's one way to look at it. Then there is <OBJECT /> and now it is all up for grabs again. And there are other vector graphics formats that are standard. X3D for one or WebCGM if that is stil viable. I'm sure one could do others. They ALWAYS have that option and so does any of the rest of us. One has to sell it, but XML enables its. When did you lose faith in XML as a freedom to innovate and begin to embrace standards as a means to stifle innovation? If HTML is a competition-enabler, it quickly proved to be not very apt. Perhaps some standards are more 'competition enabling' but in my years of doing this, I note that once the vocabulary is moreorless frozen, the numbers of viable implementations quickly drops, not increases. Standards stifle in that dimension even if they enable a layer above. Note, I'm not arguing against SVG, just noting that a browser gets bloated if it has to implement all of these forms and that is what limits development, not a spec'd language being a constraint. SVG is YetAnotherVectorMarkup and that's it. It is a popular one. And that is good. Yet SGMLers pushed back against HTML and in the beginning, they were "the industry". Don't be too sure. Fickleness is just as rife in the computer industry as it is in the music business. It is really a scheduling and resources problem based on a legacy of last week's sales. Imagine our surprise to open a book on how to do .Net in Visual Foxpro only to discover that the entire book is about migrating off of Foxpro and into C# and Visual Basic components. Will we resist that? Maybe but maybe not. Loyalty to a codebase also has a price; it's called, obsolescence. The argument with Mike was, why should the browser be considered the centerpiece of the web? I think the browser competition is over for most people given the deployment numbers if one is talking about HTML browsers. IE clearly has won that. But the HTML legacy makes it fat and I would not be surprised if getting out of the HTML business or at least, getting it off centerstage were not on some minds in Redmond and elsewhere. If you want to unhorse MS, you will have to change the rules, not use blunt trauma and competitively, standards are blunt instruments. They can turn a technology into a loss-leader. It cuts both ways. On the other hand, if the web is just plumbing and XML is just a syntactically standard spec'c payload, there is a tremendous new competition in the libraries for creating components that are web-aware but not necessarily wrapped by the HTML framework. I think that is where the evolution and the competition are going. No Uche, not next week, but sooner perhaps than will be comforting. Changing the rules by changing the environment is a very effective way to take out competitors. See automobiles and buggy whips. So again, what is the client for XDocs? If it isn't the HTML browser, then the term "web browser" has to be more generic or we will need a new marketing term (remember this one: "XML: what SGML should have been!) Starting development from the assumption that one develops for the web by developing for the HTML browser could easily become an obsolete assumption. No, the browser is still there, but not for everything. It becomes training wheels for scriptkiddies. len -----Original Message----- From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@p...] Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2002 5:29 PM To: Bullard, Claude L (Len); xml-dev@l... Subject: Re: XDocs and XForms? Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: >.... Others are > simply coming up with a tag set for their > software, maybe a few others, to consume. > >>From time to time, they might bother to lookup > what others in their industry are doing and > adopt some tags from them. If they are very > careful, they will even use the namespaces to > tell you where they borrowed them. We were talking about competition in the context of browsers. Microsoft does not have the option of inventing a new vocabulary for vector graphics. They could go the proprietary route with VML 2. They could go the standards route with SVG. They can't develop something totally new and proprietary without experiencing serious industry pushback. So *in the context of browser development*, the standardization of markup languages is very important and the implementation of those standards serves as a basis for competition. 
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