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

[Stew Dean]

At 20:02 01/06/2004, Dave Collins wrote:
>So, in a nutshell:
>
>a grassroots world community has found something truly useful, inclusive
>and free, and a large corporation has come along and is attempting to
>corner it, brand it and charge a subscription fee.
>
>Sounds about par for the course.

And it will, of course, fail.  Three letters M, S and N.  Originally this 
was going to be Internet 2. Now it's another website (I know Microsoft want 
it to be more but MSN to me is just Hotmail).  It's interesting to note 
that when I tried to add he calendar function to Hotmail I unwittingly 
signed up for MSN 8 (very unclear proposition model Microsoft). After 
receiving disks and other marketing communications and working out the true 
cost of signing up I quickly reversed my decision.

No let's take what the article is saying. Longhorn.  From my understanding 
they are trying to cover all eventualities in an XML derivative language  - 
namely  XAML. This being a standard for doing all kinds of 
things.   Essentially it turns XML into a supercharged version of HTML, 
that is the all tags are predefined although the presentation layer can 
still be altered, except this presentation layer will be built into 
windows.  Or something like that.

It all sound like the usual top down attempt of control.  But will we be 
forced to use it?  No, why should we be? What advantage will we have to 
create things in XAML?  We won't be using Microsofts CMS system (after all 
Microsoft don't).  Then there's .Net - an attempt to pre program everything 
making things more complicated and unstable than if you just borrowed some 
open source code.  In may mind it's about producing and end result and, as 
I have discovered, even the large corporations are suckered into producing 
solutions that are far more complex than are actualy needed.

No I don't get it. Could someone explain this to me. The future of the WWW 
is safe in my mind.  I can still create a site using the same technology I 
used almost ten years ago, it will still work in ten years time. Instead of 
reading a comma seperated list I can read XML or call from a CSS feed.

But then I'm an information architect and the technology could be anything 
- the end result is what matters.

Stewart Dean








>Dave Collins
>User Interface Design
>Phoenix Interactive
>300 Wellington Street
>London ON, N6B 3P2
>V: 519.679.2913 x292
>F: 519.679.6773
>E: dcollins at phoenix-interactive.com
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org] On Behalf
>Of Listera
>Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2004 2:33 PM
>To: SIGIA-L
>Subject: [Sigia-l] The future of WWW...
>
>Hyperbole? Alarmist? Spot on? Likely to change how you'll be designing
>your
>apps/sites in a few years?
>
>Smoke, Mirrors and Silence: The Browser Wars Reignite
><http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=174156&seqNum=6>
>
>Make no mistake: Microsoft really hates the web. The new browser war may
>appear to be about the emergence of Mozilla and friends with their
>polished
>eye-candy interfaces, but it's really about Microsoft versus the W3C.
>Internet Explorer is Microsoft's blocking tactic<never to be properly
>web-compliant, never to give the W3C a day in the sun<and Longhorn
>technology is the big-stick alternative being built. One of the purposes
>of
>Longhorn is to destroy the web as we know it.
>
>The web is used to provide a variety of services and communities. Part
>of
>the Longhorn strategy is to extract from the web all of the services
>with
>any profit model at all: web magazines, auction sites, news, online
>retailers, and so on. When Microsoft tempts these organizations and
>communities to Longhorn, the web suffers the death of a thousand cuts.
>Over
>here will be the standards-based web, with a gradually shrinking set of
>web
>sites. Over there will be the future Longhorn-based proprietary global
>infrastructure<a global version of the early Novell NetWare, a sort of
>stock
>market/CNN fusion for content delivery. For Microsoft, the best possible
>outcome is for the standards-based web to be reduced to the profitless:
>a
>few idealistic hippies, some idle perverts, and the disaffected. Few
>others
>will want to go there; so every day there will be fewer traditional
>websites, every day less relevance.
>
>----
>Ziya
>
>Architecture is politics.
>
>
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Stew Dean
:: www.stewdean.com ::  music :: user experience :: alife ::