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RE: The Browser Wars are Dead! Long Live the Browser Wa rs!

• To: 'Uche Ogbuji' <uche.ogbuji@f...>, Joe English <jenglish@f...>
• Subject: RE: The Browser Wars are Dead! Long Live the Browser Wa rs!
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 16:13:43 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

Right.   Now if I give it

<myXMLAnything ..> and the MIME type, it can call a generic 
stylesheet or load the objects that handle that type. Yes?

If I give it <SCRIPT 

that's HTML.

If I give it <IMG href="myGif.gif"

that's HTML.

If I give it <object

that's HTML and page integration of a foreign 
content type (eg, VRML, SVG, any plugin).

The web browser as "popularly conceived" is an HTML 
system.  That's not correct, certainly.  Given the 
content type, it will load the objects if it has the 
objects, that last bit being the real universal 
problem for web developers as the VRMLies were to 
find out.  As to namespace integrated objects, 
I'm not too optimistic.  It sounds good but the 
experiments so far seem to say that this is a 
way to build a slowwwww system.   We went round 
this argument a few thousand times with the Sony 
3D designers during the X3D work.

I don't know if I would call that a universal 
user interface.  A universal type container, maybe.

At what point is the container simply "Windows"? 

I guess at the point at which it doesn't want to 
use HTTP or URLs to catalog the objects, or the 
TCP/IP layers to get them.  It's not inconceivable 
and that is why the Box article was fascinating. 
Someone appeared to be thinking big thoughts. 
Again, breaking rules is one way to innovate, 
Outside The Box. ;-)  IOW, will I always need 
IE or it's like.  I don't think so.  Store 
and Forward, stateful transactions, etc. still 
make sense.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Uche Ogbuji [mailto:uche.ogbuji@f...]

> Paul Prescod wrote:
> 
> > Len, the Web architecture was always designed to make it easy to switch
> > HTML out. HTML has been an optional feature since day 1.  [...]
> > [...] The web browser is the application that was designed to
> > handle every content type and new content types and tasks all of the
> > time.
> 
> That's not how the Web worked on day 1 though.
> 
> The original version of HTTP only delivered HTML;
> MIME types weren't added until HTTP 1.0.  (You could
> stick a <PLAINTEXT> tag at the top of a text file,
> but that was part of the HTML layer, not HTTP.)

OK.  This explains a lot of Len's comment that zipped right by me before, but 
I certainly am not talking about "day one".  I can see no point in talking 
about that.  Who cares?  I'm talking about the Browser as popularly conceived 
and deployed.  This certainly post-dates day one as you describe it.

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