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On Sun, 24 Nov 2002 00:06:40 -0800, Paul Prescod <paul@prescod.net> wrote:
> 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.
I complely agree. But for whatever it's worth (and however short term it
may
be) proprietary formats and proprietary apps very loosely glued together
with
XML seem to be in the ascendency. I'm somewhat ambivalent -- I'd like the
full power of XML + XUL + SVG + XForms ... but may have to settle for
XML being produced and rendered via something like Flash (and XForms
implementations running in Flash, and maybe
SVG import-export?) simply because that's where the business models
actually work.
Sigh, I suppose we're getting into the mother of religious wars here, and I
don't want
to slam the open source efforts at all or imply that they are doomed or
anything.
As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that the only way we'll get to where
we want to
be is by a long period of cultivating them. I'm just talking about the
short-term reality,
where the "Web" UI innovation (or maybe just deployment) rate is losing out
to the
proprietary stuff. So long as we don't go back to the bad old days where
the data
themselves are proprietary, this may be marginally acceptable to most of us
XML geeks
and may hit the sweet spot for consumers.
I REALLY hope I'm wrong and that SVG+XUL+XForms are where HTML was in 1994
or
so. But the fact remains that if one were to deploy a rich client app in
Flash today, it
would run on something like 99% of the browsers out there. If one were to
deploy a
XUL+SVG rich client app, it would run on something like 1/10 of 1% of the
browsers out
there. I'm all for betting on the underdog, but three orders of
underdogness magnitude?
So,I'm (very reluctantly) concluding that the short term smart money is on
Flash; the
long term hope is on the XML-based UI technolgies. And I very strongly
agree with
Paul that a necessary condition for us to get to that long term vision is
for the alternative
browser developers and the XHTML folks to get their heads together, define
problems
that end users need to have solved, and go out and solve them together.
Ann will
probably laugh that they can't deprecate a bit of markup without getting
screamed at,
so how can they do something truly visionary? I guess I'm saying to ignore
the screamers;
XHTML 2 as an incremental tweak to XHTML 1 is going to be ignored by 99% of
the
users and the dominant browser developer, so why not just focus on the 1%
and do
something that will amaze them?
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