RE: XSL and Web Native distributed computing, was Re: HTML is a

Subject: RE: XSL and Web Native distributed computing, was Re: HTML is a
From: "Jonathan Borden" <jborden@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 21:22:59 -0400
Guy_Murphy@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

...At present I have been
> using HTCs
> in order to prototype GUI presentation objects, and I see no reason why
> not, and many reasons why this paradigm would be a good one to persue.

	Actually, XSL is a great way to programmatically cruft up arbitrary HTC's
and Microsoft's "behaviors" are a neat way to implement namespace handlers
e.g. adding VML support to a browser.

>
> It is right and proper that we consider documents as our starting point,
> but with regard to XML and XSL we should be considering not just the next
> 10 months, but the next 10 years.
>
> Over this period of time I think the persuit of Web applications, and the
> persuits of easily describable interfaces for shells and applications
> *will* meet, it's just a question of whether they meet with an
> embrace or a
> crunch. Netscape and MS are already making inroads into this area, both
> with very divergent strategies, as is everybody else's strategy.

	That's the problem. The standards bodies do a terrific job defining 98% of
the problem (e.g. the DOM) leaving implementors the task of arbitrarily
defining the other 2% required to get useful work done (e.g. createDocument
etc). What we end up with are platform dependent, incompatible programs.

	One of the biggest problems is the edge area of the solutions where glue
code needs to be written to get everything to work together. One thing that
ought to be a tremendous help is that Mozilla has adopted XPCOM and
XPConnect. At least once this is implemented and deployed we should get a
common syntax between MS and Mozilla about how to control a binary object
such as a C/C++ DOM/XSL implementation via JavaScript. In a similar fashion,
Java objects will integrate with JavaScript glue code.

	At the moment, its not possible to do sophisticated browser platform
independent programming without resorting to a forest of "if (ie) {} else
{}" scriptlets. Netscape is stuck in Java 1.0 land unless you use a
non-scriptable plugin, leaving IE as the only reasonable way to do client
side XML/XSL programming, but clearly Mizilla/Gecko has great potential if
it can get a good XSL implementation.

	These are my base requirements for a browser platform which supports Web
native distributed computing:

	- JavaScript
	- XML/XSL
	- HTML + XML DOM (e.g. DHTML)
	- Scriptable Java 1.1 (e.g. XPConnect or Java-COM).

	- *** Unified object model between Java, Javascript and binary objects e.g.

	var javaXML = new applet("org.w3.xml");
	var javaXSL = new applet("org.w3.xml");
	javaXSL.load("transform.xsl");
	javaXML.load("document.xml");
	var str = javaXML.transform(javaXSL);

	document.open();
	document.write(str);
	document.close();

Jonathan Borden
http://jabr.ne.mediaone.net


>
> Can XSL or an adjacent spec provide the unified description of the GUI to
> extend the Web beyond the document to both the application and onto the
> desktop?
>
	I still think that HTML is suited to the UI description task (i.e. XHTML
via XSL), employing XML for the semantic description task.

Jonathan Borden
JABR Technology Corp.
http://jabr.ne.mediaone.net
>


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