[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> [comments on Roman empire elided]
If you think history teaches or
informs, study it well. It predicts XAML will succeed
not because of conspiratorial forces, but because it is the
surface language for a complete integrated architecture
even if it is not itself terribly novel.
I am happy that Len feels vindicated: good ideas don't disappear
forever.
We can make intelligent choices. One of them could be
to pursue a standard for rich client applications in a
legitimate international standards organization instead
of a self-serving consortium.
My view of standards is that there are basically two kinds of legitimate
standards: ones that abstract away from all platforms and so can be
retargetted readily and ones that abstract on top of particular
platforms
and so make it more efficient to use the particular capabilities of that
platform. Independent and dependent.
I would say that SGML, HTML, XForms, ISMID, RELAX NG, and
XML Schemas are in the first category, while XAML, XUL, SwiXml
and even Schematron are in the second.
(This is unrelated to Gabriels' right way and wrong way, or Raymond's
cathedral versus bazaar.)
I tend not to see dependent technologies as necessary enemies of
independent standards. Rather the reverse: it will be easier to
implement some XISMID (to give it a name: lets pronounce it
"kismet") on top of XAML or XUL than on top of HTML.
> The standard exists. ISO ISMID. But it is friendless.
People interested in an overview of ISMID and IETM (I eat em=
Interactive
Electronic Technical Manuals), there are slides for an introductory
seminar
I did for ROC military at
http://www.ascc.net/xml/en/utf-8/seminars/pdf/IETM.PDF
I think it is almost the only tutorial material online.
(It is almost 10 meg, for no good reason, so probably you should
download to disk: we had reports from IE users that they had
trouble with that kind of size. It is suitable for a 4 hour seminar.
But it will give some inkling of the state-of-the-art for standards-
based, markup-based interactive documents with dynamic interfaces
from almost 10 years ago.)
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe
|
