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Re: XML, Rich Internet Apps

• To: "" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: XML, Rich Internet Apps
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2002 22:05:11 -0500
• In-reply-to: <oprgbyglqsezizxn@localhost>

mc@x... (Mike Champion) writes:
>what besides the "political and religious" objections are there to
>using Flash for rich internet apps? The main one that comes to mind is
>that I can sortof imagine DHTML+SVG scaling to a mobile platform or
>porting to a brand new OS that Macromedia hasn't gotten around to
>supporting yet.  Others?

Your last sentence hits at a more general answer, but one that some
people will likely find "political and religious".

While it's true that you can use XML to communicate with Flash, you
can't really use XML to extend the Flash platform per se - that's
controlled by Macromedia, and the guts of SWF aren't structured with XML
in mind.

The Web browser (and the Web generally), whatever its faults, at least
offers the prospect of an extensible platform that can keep up with
XML's extensibility.  While there are clear limits (set by CSS1 or CSS2
depending on the browser) as to what you can do today as far as sending
arbitrary XML to a browser, in general, that limit is mostly a matter of
what people have gotten to implementing and how open they've cared to
make their models.  

HTML+SVG is barely a stretch, HTML+MathML is sensible for particular
domains, HTML+SMIL+SVG is pretty sensible, etc.  All of these
vocabularies can be manipulated with a powerful and common set of tools.

If you think of the browser as something beyond your (our) control,
outside the possibility of extension, then you have little choice but to
accept what's given to you for now and move beyond the browser as
quickly as you can.  

If, on the other hand, you think of the browser as a presently small
window into a wide-open set of possibilities based on open data exchange
and a core set of agreements, you may see more prospect for generic
functionality that lets all of us get our particular tasks accomplished.

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org

• References:
  • Re: XML, Rich Internet Apps
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

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