RE: Wasting half a trillion dollars?

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

HTML is a document rendering model.  Use it for that 
and it works fine.  Use it handler as a container for 
lots of other rich object types and it becomes a 
bloated framework.  This was not a mystery to the 
designers of HyperCard, Mac86, and so on.  

There are two stories.  One is that the inventor 
of Enquire really did have all of this in mind 
when the WWW was envisioned.  Two is that the 
inventor of Enquire had only distributed access 
of technical papers in mind.  So the history is 
muddled and URLs to articles don't help.  The 
problem is the object framework itself.  

MS said in court that IE was required as part of 
the core deliverable for the operating system.  
Opponents (particularly netscape) said it wasn't. 
On the other hand, Netscape with its browser, Sun 
with Java, were both busily layering operating 
systems on top of operating systems to get 
marketshare.

None of this looks like the deliberate design 
of a framework to support distributed business 
processes or data exchange.  

My position then and now is that to 
support what people envision for the next generation 
of internet systems, one may have to reconsider multiple  
client framework designs.   MS is moving toward that 
and since it controls the dominant means by which 
one accesses the internet, I agree that its means 
must be considered.   On the other hand, it is 
also mired in a framework originally envisioned 
for document support and one has to ask if it 
might not be a good idea to reconsider that.

Do I really need IE or Opera or Netscape or do I need  
custom clients, or simply, as in Visual Basic, builder 
frameworks?   Or by going down that path, do 
we lose the homepage builder comfortable with 
the lower level of complexity, capable of doing 
many things, but not all?  Tim Bray claimed developers 
have already voted with their feet on this issue. 
I do wonder if a recount is in progress.

What that does for inherently stateless protocols 
is the next question?  Some say the protocol engines 
should have no knowledge of the client and don't 
need it.   It's just a data service. Isn't that 
basically what we have now with HTTP?  

In other words, as has also been stated before, 
the web is HTTP.  The rest is product inside 
operating systems and some shared data descriptions 
and languages.

<simplisticConclusion>
A *standard* network enabled operating system becomes 
the next generation internet client.  That operating system 
has to be as generalized as your TV.  The Linux people 
see this.  They don't have the clout to pull it off.
</simplisticConclusion>

Len
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Anatole Tartakovsky [mailto:anatolet@teamcti.com]

Stuart,
    One thing I did not mention in my post is HTML, and that is probably
what is causing confusion. Here it goes:
1. I think standard HTML is not usable for application development.
2. Data has to be separated from the presentation on the client - not on
ASP/JSP/Server layer to allow for true application programming
3. New set of rich databound controls has to be introduced and used by
application developers.