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That's one way to look at it. Then there
is <OBJECT /> and now it is all up for grabs
again. And there are other vector graphics
formats that are standard. X3D for one or
WebCGM if that is stil viable. I'm sure
one could do others. They ALWAYS have that
option and so does any of the rest of us.
One has to sell it, but XML enables its.
When did you lose faith in XML as a freedom
to innovate and begin to embrace standards
as a means to stifle innovation? If HTML
is a competition-enabler, it quickly proved
to be not very apt. Perhaps some standards
are more 'competition enabling' but in my
years of doing this, I note that once the
vocabulary is moreorless frozen, the numbers
of viable implementations quickly drops, not
increases. Standards stifle in that dimension
even if they enable a layer above.
Note, I'm not arguing
against SVG, just noting that a browser gets
bloated if it has to implement all of these forms
and that is what limits development, not
a spec'd language being a constraint. SVG
is YetAnotherVectorMarkup and that's it.
It is a popular one. And that is good. Yet SGMLers
pushed back against HTML and in the beginning,
they were "the industry". Don't be too sure.
Fickleness is just as rife in the computer
industry as it is in the music business. It
is really a scheduling and resources problem
based on a legacy of last week's sales.
Imagine our surprise to open a book on how
to do .Net in Visual Foxpro only to discover
that the entire book is about migrating off
of Foxpro and into C# and Visual Basic components.
Will we resist that? Maybe but maybe not.
Loyalty to a codebase also has a price; it's
called, obsolescence.
The argument with Mike was, why should the
browser be considered the centerpiece of the
web? I think the browser competition is
over for most people given the deployment
numbers if one is talking about HTML browsers.
IE clearly has won that. But the HTML legacy
makes it fat and I would not be surprised if
getting out of the HTML business or at least,
getting it off centerstage were not on some
minds in Redmond and elsewhere. If you want
to unhorse MS, you will have to change the
rules, not use blunt trauma and competitively,
standards are blunt instruments. They can
turn a technology into a loss-leader. It
cuts both ways.
On the other hand, if the web is just plumbing
and XML is just a syntactically standard spec'c payload,
there is a tremendous new competition in the
libraries for creating components that are
web-aware but not necessarily wrapped by
the HTML framework. I think that is where
the evolution and the competition are going.
No Uche, not next week, but sooner perhaps
than will be comforting. Changing the rules
by changing the environment is a very effective
way to take out competitors. See automobiles
and buggy whips.
So again, what is the client for XDocs? If
it isn't the HTML browser, then the term
"web browser" has to be more generic
or we will need a new marketing term
(remember this one: "XML: what SGML should
have been!)
Starting development from the assumption
that one develops for the web by developing
for the HTML browser could easily become an
obsolete assumption. No, the browser is
still there, but not for everything. It
becomes training wheels for scriptkiddies.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@prescod.net]
Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2002 5:29 PM
To: Bullard, Claude L (Len); xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] XDocs and XForms?
Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>.... Others are
> simply coming up with a tag set for their
> software, maybe a few others, to consume.
>
>>From time to time, they might bother to lookup
> what others in their industry are doing and
> adopt some tags from them. If they are very
> careful, they will even use the namespaces to
> tell you where they borrowed them.
We were talking about competition in the context of browsers. Microsoft
does not have the option of inventing a new vocabulary for vector
graphics. They could go the proprietary route with VML 2. They could go
the standards route with SVG. They can't develop something totally new
and proprietary without experiencing serious industry pushback.
So *in the context of browser development*, the standardization of
markup languages is very important and the implementation of those
standards serves as a basis for competition.
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