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As for the document as the centric model, maybe. For
hypermedia in general, maybe not.
Hypertext was never more than embedding a link
control inside the text itself. The rest of the thingies are
bits and pieces from other technologies. I look at XForms
and remember the firestorm of critique over the US Navy
MID design from the HTML community that was pretty darned
clueless about why such designs were sponsored and I think,
it's just timing and requirements. XForms takes the same
tack, adds web spaces, and voila, MID lives. Most of what
I see today is a recycling of ideas either copied or rediscovered
and implemented over the web substrate. In that sense,
the web has succeeded in providing an infrastructure and
the only question is will the middle hold once the retooling
of the lower layers gets into high gear.
Web services are not exactly a new idea, but when implemented
in a decent framework, are an advance. They also present a
dilemma in that with them, the local IT department that was
being relegated to the waste bin of non-essential personnel
suddenly gets a shiny new cube. With web services, the IT
department can now compete well with the third party application
system vendor by virtue of local mastery of the subject domain
and the office politics. Some of our locals are very surprised
that our customers having discovered ASP and ODBC are accessible
and with code cloning, eminently learnable, and are going
around our marketing guys to do their own thing. The VB model
of hypermedia is still a very potent one if the web service
APIs are implemented at the level of organizational forms and
the negotiation doesn't go deeper than a sharable schema.
By 1990, the advanced thinkers in the CALS groups had published
that global integration was not a document-centric issue, but one
of better object frameworks for supporting the sharing of documents
and processes (the old PPO model). Better frameworks are emerging
but we had to repeat the cycle of development at a much larger
scale (the WWW replicated most of CALS along the way). Part of
that was infrastructure development and part of it was a learning
curve amplified to a very high volume. No not all of the solutions
arrived at now were known by the HTML community, but so far, very
little done there surprises me or looks new. Shinier, better
implemented, etc., but not terribly new. I have this sense
that the windowing metaphor itself, the mouse click, etc,
in other words, Englebart's work, are a pattern that gets
reproduced at larger scales but essentially limits how
far the document-centric approach can evolve.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@rbii.com]
On Tuesday 22 January 2002 04:01 pm, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> I don't think we've begun to address the possibilities of XML's
> relatively easy 'lexical' level, so I'll leave semantics to the rest
> of you brave warriors.
Hmm. I've been feeling kind of like we threw the baby out with the
bathwater recently... XML was originally supposed to offer better
text/hypertext features to the WWW, but we seem to have missed that
point...
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