Friday, July 12, 2002

"Universal" file viewers #

These utilities are very useful to look at as we try to build our "Teacher's Box" (which ideally would be able to handle arbitrary file formats).  From the article: When it comes to viewing files, Windows Explorer does a truly awful job. The industry-standard file manager can't handle even simple tasks, such as letting you quickly look at the contents of your files, especially if they're in an unusual format. Luckily for you, ZDNet Downloads is chock-full of file viewers that put Windows to shame. Here are three you should check out.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/12/02; 10:18:55 AM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

Good to see others interested in the Universal Canvas #

I have found surprisingly little talk about the "universal canvas" idea on the Internet.  So it's a great pleasure for me to stumble upon some comments, even if they are sporadic.  Frank Lannarilli  wrote the following in April 2002 on the Byte Forum: I want the Universal Canvas NOW (or soon)! (cf. http://udell.roninhouse.com/GroupwareReport.html). What is out there and available?? I pose this question to the forum, and share some of my (sad-to-say paltry) findings, in hope that some of you can share some better findings.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/12/02; 9:56:49 AM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

Is typing in conflict with lightweight markup? #

From Simon St. Laurent: The W3C has already poisoned markup substantially with W3C XML Schema's various notions of type.  While XQuery has taken a few steps to separate itself from the PSVI, its own notions of type substantially complicate XQuery and have infected XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0. The PSVI is just one especially nasty aspect of the problems created by retrofitting notions of type which come from object-oriented and relational systems (conflicting notions, at that) onto markup.  I expect the inconsistencies and complications of this decision to take a heavier toll on XML and the W3C than namespace and URI issues have taken in the past. The W3C needs to think seriously about what it wants from markup.  I think  the W3C has lost sight of the promise XML originally had for the Web, as a lightweight format for loosely-coupling information producers and consumers.  Instead, recent efforts seem to be aimed at recreating CORBA or DCOM, a style of technology I thought the Web had pretty much shown up over the last decade. These seem like fundamentally architectural issues to me, needing some serious discussion with a heavy dose of courage.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/12/02; 7:44:38 AM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss