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Cool,
Rick. That was a trip through the waay-back machine. Thank you Mr
Peabody!
There
actually are some more online materials but your tutorial is
excellent.
Fate
is right. ;-) XISMID is not taken AFAIK. There are two claims for
XAML, BTW.
MID
was proposed because as Rick notes, it became necessary to specify what
was
loosely termed, the View Package. The IETMDB specified content and some
sequencing and conditional processing, but not the layout. We
needed a means
to get
a consistent layout of the screen and to make the behavior portable across
delivery devices. We knew then that we would not make a soldier
drag a desktop
into
the field and work on handheld devices was underway. We did not want to
make
the layout so specific that a stylesheet would be needed, but we needed
to
interoperate with stylesheets. We understood event-driving both at the
micro
level
of the content display and at the macro level of the organization using the
device
(there are interesting NLDS aspects to that). We knew that
interactive
equalled programming but that programmers are expensive and bad technical
writers, so we needed a minimum of programming. MID I yin and
yanged between
an
object-oriented programming language and a wizard like container language
with
some branching logic. The latter won out in MID I and MID II generalized
the
idea. While IETMs were the focus and the deliverable, most everyone
on
the
team had their eye on the enterprise applications for very large distributed
hypertext. There are multiple implementations of MID but I
really don't know
where
they are now. MID had been paid for out of US Navy funds and
those
disappeared as Bosnia took up the slack in the budgets. Dave Cooper
at
Antech Systems became the ISO ISMID editor and that is as far as the
project got AFAIK.
Rick
is completely on target in his presentation. To apply it now, it
would
need
some work to adjust it to XML, possibly namespaces, and the web
architecture. It is worth investigating.
Pros:
1. It exists as a standard. No one needs to ramp up or choose an
organization.
No patents apply. This is a matter of ISO
will. I really don't know who does
that now, but we know who to
ask.
2. It is the right idea but would need technical updating.
The hard part is to
keep this simple enough that everyone can
implement it. We had the
IETMDB mil standard to keep us focused.
External interfaces would
need to accomodate REST and non-REST
architectures. This is a bit
like the XML WG: take something and cut
out the unnecessary bits,
add some bits from lessons learned, and hit the
sweet spot. Because
it was friendless for so long, the good news is
that it hasn't accreted as
much as SGML had.
3. Work could start soon and be ready as the rich clients are
hitting the streets.
The timing would be
excellent.
Cons:
1. Politics. 'nuff said.
2. Getting a crew to work on it. This would be an ISO
project, it has to
be international, and it has to include the
vendors and the consortia.
3. If it wanders away from target (More Meta Than Thou - I assure
you it
is very tough to keep the cats in line), it will
fail.
len
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
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