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Good
points.
I'm
not sure if XISMID or ISMID should have a page per se, although I guess
one
could say a container is the analog. The original MID I had
infoContainers as a top level
element, and one could stack these in a single document with navigation
among them. It is
similar to the pre-web concept of frames except no sequentiality was
inferred by default. All
navigation was explicit. I'd have to open ISMID to see what is
there now. MID was not
designed with the web in mind. Primarily, we needed to separate
content from presentation
and to
enable separation of behavior. There was a notion of loose
coupling if not called
that,
but that was because there was a database of content and the MID was designed
to be
a client to that similar to the way an HTML page is a client to a server.
But the
MID
was supposed to be persistent and did not replace a display. I
don't think we
ever
worked out precisely how to handle the two different sequencing models of the
view
package and the IETMDB. Dave Cooper and Brian Markey did the ISMID
work,
so I would have to see what the final state of that was. I suspect
if we threw
that,
XAML and XUL into the pot, we'd get a good notion of what a rich client must
support. VRML radically altered my thinking since the MID
project. I tend to think
now in
terms of spatial coordinate systems nesting, transforming, scaling, sensing
and so
on. Dang, I feel an attack of MMTT coming on. That's bad.
;-)
Are
you saying an IETM needs to download in one chunk? That would be a
problem. If
it is
an IETM, they are large beasties, heavily cross referenced, and in today's world
vs
1993, will support integrated procedures and animations. It gets
even murkier if
one
uses real time 3D as the host language.
If
anyone takes up XISMID as a project, let me know. It will definitely take
some
rethinking. I'm not even sure if the container/window approach
makes good sense
given
a 3D host. We didn't have those in 93 even though John Junod brought up
that
possibility. He was chided and that shows just how easy it is to not take
the
future seriously enough, and why standards can have limited shelf lives if
the
designers limit their imaginations. On the other hand, standards should
have
limited shelf lives. ;-)
len
P.S. Len, this is a definite
issue for an XISMID design: the IETM needs to
be physically available as
one page, one for each URL. (And any
content-dependent information
models used must have the basic
streaming discipline of never requiring
forward references to perform
rendering.)
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