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Re: The Browser Wars are Dead! Long Live the Browser Wars!

• To: tblanchard@m...
• Subject: Re: The Browser Wars are Dead! Long Live the Browser Wars!
• From: "m batsis" <mbatsis@n...>
• Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 12:36:29 +0300
• Cc: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>, xml-dev@l..., "Bullard Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Organization: Netsmart S.A., Greece
• References: <3E85C0F2-E4D5-11D6-BFB3-0030657E2F34@m...>
• Reply-to: mbatsis@n...
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.2a) Gecko/20020910

tblanchard@m... wrote:
> 
> On Friday, October 18, 2002, at 07:59  PM, Paul Prescod wrote:
>
>> Based on dHTML, XUL, dSVG, HTML, java, .NET? I can't predict yet. 
>> These days I'm experimenting with dynamic SVG. I'd love to see XUL 
>> standardized.
> 
> 
> No, none of these are enough (well, maybe java, only the current 
> implementations aren't up to it).  These only specify *appearances* not 
> behavior.  We want to get behavior into the UI layer.  No more elaborate 
> syntax is going to solve this problem. 

Java certainly does include behavior although seperation of conserns is 
another subject. You may be interested in UIML [1] on that.

But XUL and company is by far the most well designed framework I have 
some experience with. XBL [2] contains the behavior and provides almost 
unlimited extensibility in a flexible approach.


 > The problem as I see it is that
> XML is a retrograde development in computer science and application 
> architecture.

Hammers are the best in what they do. Similarly, XML offers new 
possibilities in exchanging and using datastructures, provides for 
interoperability and many more. But this surely belongs to other threads...


> In the early software days the emphasis was on behavior (C, Fortran, 
> Pascal, procedures, functions) and data was secondary.  Presently the 
> emphasis appears to be data formats (and serial ones at that).

I enjoy clever data formats that allow reusable behavior code.


> Somewhere in between was a balanced approach that bound behavior with 
> data into entities we called "objects".   It is my opinion that browsers 
> need to move from glorified page layout engines with ugly scripting 
> languages towards full blown distributed object engines that happen to 
> have rich page layout capabilities.

The problem is this sounds generic enough for one to say it's alrady 
done ;-)


> Let us not forget that the browser was designed to share documents.  
> Application delivery was a secondary concern and its definitely a force 
> fit.  The paradigm is wrong and switching from HTML to ZZML isn't going 
> to change that.[...]

It's a matter of perspective; programmers vs authors and wildcards in 
the middle trying to make the most out of it.

[1] http://www.uiml.org/specs/
[2] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xbl/xbl.html

Manos

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