OASIS Mailing List ArchivesView the OASIS mailing list archive below
or browse/search using MarkMail.

 


Help: OASIS Mailing Lists Help | MarkMail Help

 


 

   RE: [xml-dev] What are the arguments *for* XHTML 2.0?

[ Lists Home | Date Index | Thread Index ]

for me, but if this is Paul's refutation of the "browser is dead" thread,
it is a good statement of the UIVM idea, long on politics, but it is a blog.  
 
The University of Waterloo did some similar work but I've long since lost
the library reference for that.  The idea dawned on me while we were doing
the MID work for the Navy. Our sponsor at Carderock, Eric Jorgensen, referred
to it as a notional player.   Eric is an often uncredited but far-sighted guy.
 
That was the IETM world where the requirements were elaborated
in the contexts of a US Tri-service requirement for a common IETM presentation
system.    Separation of presentation logic and properties and database
properties was an assumed part of the IETM strategy before the web.
CALS was the original Thor's hammer of SGML and the nascent
hypermedia lunatic fringe.    The problem was that there were lots
of IETM browsers, but each one was owned by a company, had it's
own formats, and so on.  Proprietary, as Mike says, and worse, usually
tied to one or the other services.  Since the IETMDB was already
a fait accompli, what was needed was the means to deliver the
presentation in a neutral language.   We designed MID for that, but
we were too late and OBE.
 
The UIVM concept worked for the MID, it works for web browsers, and so on.  
It did depend on a language (the candidate then was MID II) that made the
GUI features dominant:  ease and expense of authoring is a factor.  
Still, it isn't a hard idea to grasp.  As I've said before, anyone who ever opened a
Windows 3.1 resources file got the idea quickly.    Where it fell apart
in SGML was exactly where one would suspect:  the need or application
of SUBDOCs because otherwise, associating the database to the presentation 
wasn't easy to do using standard means.   This was before XML and before XML namespaces. 
One of the folks that looked at MID and worked with it a bit was Jean Paoli
then at GRIF.   Yuri Rubinsky came to tell me later that no one would use MID because
HTML had to succeed at any price.   As he said, "for the first time in 
its history, SoftQuad is showing a profit".  Sorry folks, but a lot of 
web pioneers had to do that to keep "contributing".   It isn't that only
profits matter, but that profits matter.
 
So nothing new under the sun, but historical precedents show that
different groups without cross-pollination arrived at essentially the same
idea and found it both attractive and implementable.  That, as I recall, means
it passes TimBL's principle of independent invention filter.
 
The critical problem, market wise, is the legacy.   Otherwise, does XHTML 
have the right stuff?  The question is simply, as you put it, are there enough
advantages to make the pain of adoption worthwhile?   I don't know.   Browsers
are freebies, so a lot of that pain is some other vendor's to suffer.  My only
point is that that are options that would enable them to say "you can do
that with this other model" (eg, XDocs, smart clients, what have you) and
avoid the pain or the costs.   What you should be looking for is something
that can be done with XHTML 2.0 that can't be done other ways for the
same or less cost.
 
len

From: AndrewWatt2000@aol.com [mailto:AndrewWatt2000@aol.com]
In a message dated 20/11/2002 16:43:15 GMT Standard Time, clbullar@ingr.com writes:

Andrew:

1.  Does XHTML 2.0 have a future?  Yes.  For those who believe in and
want to pursue development of the Universal Interface Virtual Machine (UIVM)
as Paul calls it, a native language for that machine is needed.  

Is
http://www.blogstream.com/pauls/1034787029
the fullest development of that idea?

Although it seems to have been less than obvious to a few on this list I am actually trying to explore what I see as a serious issue.




 

News | XML in Industry | Calendar | XML Registry
Marketplace | Resources | MyXML.org | Sponsors | Privacy Statement

Copyright 2001 XML.org. This site is hosted by OASIS