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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: What are the arguments *for* XHTML 2.0?
 On Sun, 24 Nov 2002 00:06:40 -0800, Paul Prescod <paul@p...> wrote: > Between SVG and XForms (to say nothing of RSS, RDF and OWL), the Web standards > platform has more functionality than we can swallow in the next several > years. If we could get full implementations of SVG, XForms and something > like XUL, the Web would be immeasurably more powerful than it is today. I complely agree. But for whatever it's worth (and however short term it may be) proprietary formats and proprietary apps very loosely glued together with XML seem to be in the ascendency. I'm somewhat ambivalent -- I'd like the full power of XML + XUL + SVG + XForms ... but may have to settle for XML being produced and rendered via something like Flash (and XForms implementations running in Flash, and maybe SVG import-export?) simply because that's where the business models actually work. Sigh, I suppose we're getting into the mother of religious wars here, and I don't want to slam the open source efforts at all or imply that they are doomed or anything. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that the only way we'll get to where we want to be is by a long period of cultivating them. I'm just talking about the short-term reality, where the "Web" UI innovation (or maybe just deployment) rate is losing out to the proprietary stuff. So long as we don't go back to the bad old days where the data themselves are proprietary, this may be marginally acceptable to most of us XML geeks and may hit the sweet spot for consumers. I REALLY hope I'm wrong and that SVG+XUL+XForms are where HTML was in 1994 or so. But the fact remains that if one were to deploy a rich client app in Flash today, it would run on something like 99% of the browsers out there. If one were to deploy a XUL+SVG rich client app, it would run on something like 1/10 of 1% of the browsers out there. I'm all for betting on the underdog, but three orders of underdogness magnitude? So,I'm (very reluctantly) concluding that the short term smart money is on Flash; the long term hope is on the XML-based UI technolgies. And I very strongly agree with Paul that a necessary condition for us to get to that long term vision is for the alternative browser developers and the XHTML folks to get their heads together, define problems that end users need to have solved, and go out and solve them together. Ann will probably laugh that they can't deprecate a bit of markup without getting screamed at, so how can they do something truly visionary? I guess I'm saying to ignore the screamers; XHTML 2 as an incremental tweak to XHTML 1 is going to be ignored by 99% of the users and the dominant browser developer, so why not just focus on the 1% and do something that will amaze them? 
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