[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: 2007 Predictions
I really like this assessment of the nature of the web as 'largely boring'. I reckon this to be one of the strengths of it nowadays. The business user of the Internet can feel assured of getting paid when the work is hum-drum because the business is separate from the pleasure. Upper management though can get the pleasurable bits like 3XD in their reports so that is more like the leisure use of the Internet (executive toys). So to do it as a job, keep it boring (maybe even showing the 'tags' now and then), but to sell it to the leisure market use video, games and clever graphics: Not always the rule of course but it seems to apply where business documents are concerned. Too much pleasure and it becomes the domain of pleasure-seekers and executives. Too little and they pay you to do it for them. :-) All the best Stephen Green >>> "Len Bullard" <cbullard@h...> 21/01/07 19:11:33 >>> Noah, it makes the point exactly: if the performance [expletive deleted], the fun goes out of it and then it becomes a boring repetitive and largely uncreative means of embedding moving gimlets inside infinite texts. The web today is largely boring. That is why Second Life, World of Warcraft, YouTube and so on are the new kids on the block. I'll come back to these later in my curmudgeonly pursuit of these topics because imitating them is also not the best place to fish. The globally shared information space does not exist because of the browser. It exists because of the largely shared and limited dimensionality of URI-based linking which even Tim Bray is admitting some years later is inadequate to create a persistent reliable address space, but hey, better late than never. It exists because the hypertext pioneers who used advanced means were pushed aside by amateurs using impoverished means, and it triumphed over the masses the same way Bill Haley and The Comets triumphed over Cole Porter. I understand what you are saying, but remember, it is the glorification of mediocrity which although democratic is also easily led by its nose to smell the Glade air refresher mechanically masking the scent of an organically stinky room. The web has now been fielded long enough that we have by popular acclamation and marketing machination had two whole versions of it. The new one is almost as good as the desktops of twenty years ago. For all of the announcements and pronouncements on this list about how 'everyone who is anyone builds for the web because all the important innovations are there', the truth is by easy comparison, it is a medium that remains a decade and a half behind its desktop parent in the same way that rock remained behind the jazz players that preceded it for two decades (the break even point being Steely Dan, after which it plunged back into merciless mediocrity with the rise of punk and thrash). I am not unhappy about that and the Geico ads don't depress my Neanderthal forehead. But I have to stick to the truth here and the truth is that thin is skinny and server-side is fat and in combination, they are still slow and not that entertaining. They are just as AM radio was in 1960, quite ubiquitous so if you are recording and mixing for monaural sound, go for it. Otherwise, you may want to start looking at browser-less applications, rich in controls, rich in content, and created for those who simply don't mind a 15 minute download if after that, they can now play in a very entertaining, fast moving, ever changing and even financially rewarding world. From this point forward, making money inside the HTML browser will be like extracting oil from shale. You can but you can also drill. I don't want to build apps as good as Excel. There is only one Beatles, one Elvis and one Brian Jones. I don't want to be them. Most of them are dead. Even if I don't have hits, I want to sell to 17 year old boys and girls who are a little disenchanted with Mom and Dad's World Wide Web and who still buy in Wal-Mart if they can be the first in high school to have one. They want their own small and very fast moving world. Webs are for spiders and mosquitos. len From: noah_mendelsohn@u... [mailto:noah_mendelsohn@u...] Sent: Friday, January 19, 2007 9:23 PM 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. _______________________________________________________________________ XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS to support XML implementation and development. To minimize spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. 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