Re: Bad News on IE6 XML Support

[Chuck White <chuckwh@pacbell.net>]

I'm with you on SVG completely -- as soon as the tools are out I'm in.
Illustrator is already exporting nice static pages, but my designers can't
code the DOM and I won't ask them to learn how to (the SVG interactive
pallete requires strong scripting knowledge). As soon as someone outputs a
visual editor that outputs interactive SVG that is as reliable as Flash, I'm
on board. And I know your answer to that: Someone will, and soon. I've been
watching SVG with keen interest, and am very excited about it. But it's not
production-ready yet, and I can't recommend it to my clients until it is
both reliable at the production level and has an installed user base of more
than about 1% of all users. My clients are bottom-line people, not
experimenters.

In a perfect world, the killer SVG tool will *still* separate content from
presentation. The possibility of edit once, present everywhere is very
appealing to those of us who do a lot of editorial and artistic production.

I actually hope you are right about client-side CSS. I myself have been
using it for years, and wrote an article for Web Techniques back in 97 on
how to do CSS positioning. Oh, look, nobody's really doing it yet. Why? Even
though designing in tables is unnatural and perverse, unless you have the
resources to write lots of browser sniffing routines, it's the only way to
present to a huge population of people who simply don't bother upgrading
their browsers. I don't have the stomach to test my CSS Positioning code in
IE4 for the Mac, or the aforemention Netscape 4, which was little more than
a freely downloadable virus.

I don't need to be convinced about the efficacy of cool technologies. I just
need to see them in a sufficiently installed base of users before I can
recommend them to clients in a time of limited budgets.

I don't think we really disagree here, anyway. I am a strong advocate for
all of this stuff. But the realities of the marketplace dictate my
recommendations, and the reality is that the migration to these technologies
tends to be slow. I'm glad you're trying to speed them up. Hats off.

Chuck White
CEO
The Tumeric Partnership
http://www.tumeric.net
chuck@tumeric.net
________________________________________
Co-Author, Mastering XML, Premium Edition
Sybex Books, May, 2001
http://www.javertising.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Berjon" <robin@knowscape.com>
To: <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2001 10:47 AM
Subject: Re: Bad News on IE6 XML Support


> On Saturday 08 September 2001 19:03, Chuck White wrote:
> > I'm a graphic artist/writer who learned programming and I can tell you
that
> > I would never ask my designers to design for client-side XML. XML is
meant
> > for the server until support for it on the browser becomes ubiquitous,
and
> > it's nowhere near that now. Nobody should be encouragng designers or
HTML
> > jockeys to write client-side XML period, for any reason, unless it's for
a
> > closed system or they just want to learn it. Sorry, but this holds true
for
> > XHTML as well.
>
> Well as someone who's been pushing SVG -- which to me seems to be a
> client-side XML technology -- to everyone in my company and outside for
quite
> some time, I can only disagree with you. It would seem that SVG is taking
the
> world by storm and my present incoming log of SVG related contracts seems
to
> confirm that. I'm pretty certain that I'm not in the only company to be
> seeing this.
>
> As for XHTML, when Netscape 4 finally dies the terrible death that it
> deserves then it'll be possible (that is, it's possible now but not with
the
> kind of precise rendering that people want). In fact, N4 is now low enough
> that people that still use it will probably understand why they're seeing
a
> page that does display, but in a degraded way (XHTML does degrade ok
there,
> elsewhere it works). I just scheduled a complete technical makeover of our
> own site, and it'll be 100% XHTML/CSS/SVG. Judging from all the
experiments
> we conducted there, I'm confident that it's the way to go, now.
>
> --
> _______________________________________________________________________
> Robin Berjon <robin@knowscape.com> -- CTO
> k n o w s c a p e : // venture knowledge agency www.knowscape.com
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Brain damage is all in your head.
>
>
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