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RE: 2007 Predictions

• From: noah_mendelsohn@u...
• To: "Len Bullard" <cbullard@h...>
• Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:22:47 -0500

Len Bullard writes;

> Yes.  Why do that?  It's harder and it locks everyone to the same 
> flying pig.  Why not get the operating system services from the 
> operating system
> and enable the high-performance applications to breathe instead of 
> [expletive deleted] in the bad air and polluted event systems that are so evident in 
HTML?

I think this somewhat misses the point.  Absolutely you get richer 
services and better performance on any given platform by using the native 
services of a well designed OS.  That's been true since the day the Web 
took off.  Nobody in their right mind would implement the UI for an 
application like Excel purely in HTML.  So we agree on that.

What's not being discussed is why all this Web/HTML/XML stuff is so 
valuable:  it's because of the shared, global information space that is 
the Web.  It's always been true that you could do a fancier job of 
presenting a weather report by using Windows GDI, OpenGL, native OS 
threads, etc.  Maybe you can fly through those satellite images in 3D. 
What you don't get out of that is the ability to share the weather report 
with a few hundred million people, to cross link it to a travel 
reservation hosted at a completely separate organization, and by the way 
possibly using a different operating system.

Because the Web has proven so valuable, the capabilties of HTML, CSS and 
related technologies have gradually improved to the point where they are 
on good days capable of approximating effects that were formerly available 
only with OS-native services.  For my money, Yahoo mail does a pretty good 
job with Ajax trickery.  Nonetheless, as the Web stack has matured, the 
bar has moved, and we now find increasingly robust stacks that provide not 
only 3D, but also integrated animation, multimedia, alpha blending etc. 
Once again, the tradeoff is between standardized interchange on the wire 
and the highest fidelity rendering that the hardware can do.  I do think 
there is a challenge to the Web stack to stay not too far behind.  If the 
Web were just fixed pitch ASCII text, I doubt we'd find that an acceptable 
compromise.  Indeed, one of the factors I've suggested we consider in the 
great tag-soup/XHTML debate is the ability of the two approaches to evolve 
as the expectations for richer documents and applications continues to 
evolve.

Noah

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
--------------------------------------








"Len Bullard" <cbullard@h...>
01/16/2007 01:56 PM
 
        To:     "'Nathan Young -X \(natyoung - Artizen at Cisco\)'" 
<natyoung@c...>, "'Kurt Cagle'" <kurt.cagle@g...>
        cc:     "'XML Developers List'" <xml-dev@l...>, (bcc: 
Noah Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM)
        Subject:        RE:  2007 Predictions


Yes.  Why do that?  It's harder and it locks everyone to the same flying
pig.  Why not get the operating system services from the operating system
and enable the high-performance applications to breathe instead of [expletive deleted]
in the bad air and polluted event systems that are so evident in HTML?

Sharable scripting frameworks a la ECMAScript?  Certainly do that. Forcing
everything into divs?  They used to call those 'frames' before Windows
adopted that term for panes. The first markup browser to use those 
publicly
was beaten up for doing it.  What's the point of plugins that can't do 
their
jobs by virtue of the fact that they are plugged into an object framework
designed for an infinite length 'page' instead of an immersive cueing 
frame
rate?

I think Howard Rheingold is right.  Web designers have no memory.

len


From: Nathan Young -X (natyoung - Artizen at Cisco)
[mailto:natyoung@c...] 

I see the browser as the OS for these apps.  Is that too cliche?




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