That chain is too loose to chafe.  Training 
wheels are not for nothing if a child learns 
to go forward and backward, nexting their 
way to a destination.  Eventually, they 
should also learn to keep their balance 
without supports, make sharp turns, and 
get on and off without Dad and Mom helping.

I think XDocs will work just fine.  Paoli 
has a lot of experience and if his team 
is good, probably hundreds of years of it. 

We'll have to see.  Maybe XForms is like 
the MID and HyTime:  good ideas that will 
be absorbed into the running code of 
others.  Until then, we still have Previous 
and Next and a History list, all URL based.

If the app is using well-formed XML
and customer-supplied schemas,
what does proprietary mean?  Like 
HTC components, *how* the work gets done 
isn't as important as that the data can 
be gotten in and out to other systems 
without modification.   The browser 
wars are over.  The browser lost. 
Deal with it.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@[...].org]

10/15/2002 2:52:28 PM, "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@[...].com>  wrote:

> I'm mystified as to why you would think this 
> would all go into IE.  Surely by now you've 
> come to understand that a web browser based 
> on HTML is a boat anchor.  A tag-soup 
> browser was and always has been a short sighted, 
> way to implement a hypermedia system.  We knew it 
> in 1993. 

<yanking-lens-chain> 
All those fools who wasted their time deploying
Web infrastructure and applications.  All for nothing,
eh? Too bad they didn't listen to you in 1993. We'd 
probably have something REAL slick like Xanadu by now ;-)
</yanking-lens-chain> 

>  The world needed training wheels 
> and UofC and Berners-Lee gave them 
> that.  It is almost a decade later, and 
> having repeated a decade of hypertext 
> research, fixing some nits, and getting 
> markup out there instead of gencode, 
> the time of the browser-centric web is 
> coming to an end for enterprise developers.

That may be.  It will be very interesting to see if
XDocs succeeds where Blackbird failed (e.g.,
as a "high-quality", commercial-strength, cleaned-up
replacement for an evolved format).

<pouring-gas-on-the-fire> 
I personally can't think of anyone who ever won a
significant bet against Worse is Better .....
</pouring-bas-on-the-fire> 

For the record, I'll bet on (X)HTML forms here ...
OTOH, I've thought for a long time that a product such as
XDocs that could generate a decent UI to populate instances
of a specific schema would be a killer app.  Whether that
is done in all-proprietary code a la XDocs, in some HTML forms
-based hack, or with XForms remains to be seen.

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