[Sigia-l] The future of WWW...

[Listera]

Dave:

> This list is for IA, big and small, and we are a user centered design
> community, this means that THE USER needs to come first.

I'll come back to this a little later.
 
> HTML succeeded b/c of simplicity, but more b/c it was text-based and
> this allowed for a much simpler set of rendering tools and programming
> tools to exist. 

HTML rendering engine (the browser) is an extraordinarily complex piece of
software, as is an authoring tool like Dreamweaver.
 
> People have worried about stagnation. Interesting, b/c isn't the web
> pretty stagnant right now?

I'm not sure. But if it is, don't you think the fact that the vastly
dominant browser hasn't been upgraded in half a decade has something to do
with it? And the fact that the monopoly holder has deemphasized and finally
killed the browser as a standalone? Yes, we have reached a certain state of
maturity on the web. You can characterize it as stagnation or stability.
 
> Thinking that the "file" menu would help them open a file from our system,
> etc. etc.

Don't get me started on the imbecility of menus attached to windows in
Windows to begin with.
 
> Ziya, you mentioned being able to do this w/o the browser? x-platform?
> w/o any installed code? Please explain more about how you did this b/c
> I have never had an engineer express this possibility. You implied
> that you could do it w/o any added C or VB code installed and this to
> me is the key. If I have to install something then I'm lost. But I am
> indeed curious.

You didn't want to deal with the browser when running RIAs (a la XUL). So I
said you can use the rendering engine without having to work in a browser.
The example I gave is a RIA (which can work Win/Mac/Linux if needed, but I
just need it on Mac) that uses an embedded rendering engine that can be
programmatically controlled by the app so it becomes just another UI widget
on the screen. The app looks and acts like any other app on a Mac, but is
fully capable, when needed, of rendering anything that the Safari web
browser is, in a portion of the screen. Just like other RIAs, it has to be
installed. There's no getting around that. Unless you have Avalon as part of
the Longhorn OS, in which case your runtime will be already installed.

Which brings me back to your "THE USER needs to come first." This is what I
don't get about your stance. Your desire to have richer tools to work with
is certainly understandable, I have advocated that for years also. But that
shouldn't grant you a license to call for capitulation to a convicted
monopoly abuser, thereby literally disenfranchising millions of users.
That's not putting the users' needs first at all.

If the next step from HTML is XAML, which will only run on one variant of
Windows with certain hardware requirements sometime in the future, then
non-Longhorn users will be marginalized. That's dozens of millions of
Mac/Linux/Unix/PDA *and* pre-Longhorn Windows users around the world. That's
not a very user friendly approach.

If we wait for Longhorn to reach a sizeable userbase meaningful enough to
deploy XAML-based RIAs that's another half a decade or so.

Meanwhile, XUL and MXML (Flash) are x-platform NOW and will be so half a
decade from now as well. If numbers can be believed, Flash runtime is
ALREADY deployed far more deeply than any variant of Windows now or Longhorn
will be in half a decade.

Since I can't imagine an OS/platform not capable of fully participating in
the web/Internet surviving in this day and age, your capitulation to XAML
would effectively kill off pre-Longhorn Windows as well as Mac/Linux/etc.
Maybe that's precisely what MS wants, but about the rest of the civilized
world?

Ziya
Nullius in Verba