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Mike Champion wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Nov 2002 13:45:03 -0800, Paul Prescod wrote:
>
>
> > Son of Flash or Son of Blackbird would have to have a compelling
> > business case for anyone to care about it. Microsoft could not make an
> > announcement that they are inventing a hypertext language for markup
> > (HTLM) and expect anyone to care.
>
>
> Yeah, but they can get to Son of Blackbird one little proprietary
> enhancement at a time. Or more plausibly, Flash could become more and
> more of a generic hypertext language one step at a time.
Flash is so far from being a competitor to XHTML that it isn't even
funny. Macromedia would never pitch it as that because they know that
the two aren't comparable and it would take a total overhaul to make
them comparable. Flash isn't even indexed by Google, deployment of the
plugin is not high enough to make it practical for "average" web pages
it will never be high enough. Where there are dozens of XHTML editing
tools (and getting to be that many for SVG) only Macromedia makes Flash
editors. etc. etc.
> My point is not
> that we have to be alert to keep the Evil MS or MM people from
> embracing and extinguishing the Web, but that the Web standards have
> to keep up to keep the non-evil but frustrated people at big
> companies from being tempted to do this. ... and to keep the even
> more frustrated developers and webmasters from being tempted to go
> further away from the universal platform ideal.
Between SVG and XForms (to say nothing of RSS, RDF and OWL), the Web
standards platform has more functionality than we can swallow in the
next several years. If we could get full implementations of SVG, XForms
and something like XUL, the Web would be immeasurably more powerful than
it is today.
Adding XHTML 2 to the pile doesn't make much difference one way or the
other, from my point of view.
Paul Prescod
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