[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
For many applications, the axes of rendering and behavioral
fidelity are the exact reason for the application failing in
the market or spiraling as, Alaric says, toward a single
vendor solution. We've seen that in the web browser, we've
seen that in Flash, we've seen that in VRML. X3D is being
crafted with that problem in mind. XSLT doesn't fix implementation
issues in the browser in the least. That is the reason
for conformance testing.
As to the triples datamodel and automated negotiation among
agents, that problem is solvable although the cost of the
solution is quite high as the AI researchers doing expert
systems work can tell you. The scalability of the language
or implementation is irrelevant to that cost. Also, the
acceptability of outcomes of negotiation to the human owners of
agents is the grinder. As the AI veterans told us, rationality
is a weak predictor of human behavior, and in any set of
processes pipelined, hierarchical, or some combination, the fact
that the system itself is a source of human bias vastly complicates the
prediction of the outcome and raises the costs. For some
recent thoughts on that
http://hbsworkingknowledge.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=4170&t=operations
We are still a long way from believing in the deity of
Colossus: The Forbin Project.
len
From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@metalab.unc.edu]
At 1:36 AM +0100 6/8/04, Alaric B Snell wrote:
>...a web browser that gets deployed on millions of random machines
>all over the place, then instead you get developers having to test
>their HTML against a list of major browsers, and being wary about
>including things like MathML, SVG, Java, Flash, etc. in their sites.
>It appears that "in the large", these kinds of systems tend to end
>up constraining the producers of content to a schema ("works in IE")
>anyway.
Again, this is based on the same fundamental fallacy that everyone
must do the same thing with the same data. The reason we get into
these test everywhere problems is because web designers are trying to
make sure that everyone sees something pretty close to exactly the
same thing.
Provide well-formed content in XML (not Flash or Java, please) and
offer one or more stylesheets that suggest a possible presentation;
and you're good to go. That's the first step in the XML vision. It
enables readers to read content in a straight-forward fashion, while
still customizing their experience. It also allows the information to
be repurposed for tasks go beyond mere browsing, without extra effort
form the publisher.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an
initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org>
The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription
manager: <http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/index.php>
|
