RE: [xml-dev] The Browser Wars are Dead! Long Live the Browser Wa rs!

[Mike Champion <mc@xegesis.org>]

10/18/2002 10:52:38 AM, "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com> wrote:


>What I read about XDocs is intriguing because it appears  
>to make the web available to the other components without
>dragging around what for some applications is the useless 
>overhead of HTML but integrates WYSIWYG like document 
>editing with structured relational data.  Sounds Good.  
>Waiting to see what these are.  Otherwise, back to hacking Fox.

I must say that XDocs sounds a LOT more appealing when described
that way than in the breathless Next Big Thing prose of the MS
marketing weasels and top executives.  Doing for XML what
FoxPro does for SQL sounds like a Good Idea.  If you can
afford/manage a thick client application on the desk 
of every user naturally you'll get lots of advantages.  If 
you don't need the universality of HTML it's a "worse" rather
than "worse is better" solution, definitely. On the other hand,
if one's customer needs a special-purpose application installed
in order to do business with you over the Web, that's a 
total non-starter for an awful lot of us.  As Paul said, 
we've been talking past one another.



>
>What I heard in Cagle's description of Box's speech 
>intrigued me.  It was as if someone was actually taking 
>the time to do some serious what-if thinking about 
>a new generation of very large distibuted computing 
>frameworks not hamstrung by the legacy of a 40 year old 
>stateless network architecture designed for nuclear blowout.

Well, I for one hope that my local public safety folks' 
network can survive a tornado, and suspect 
that the distributed architecture designed to survive 
nuclear attack will do the job well.   I'll be the first in
line at the polls to vote out of office any b****** 
who risks my life by approving a network infrastructure 
designed to make life easier for application programmers
who can't be bothered to think about all the ways that
distributed applications can fail. 

40-year-old aged brandy beats brand-new KoolAid any day :-)