Alternatives to browsers (was Re: Alternatives to the W3C)

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 08:56 AM 1/18/00 -0800, Tim Bray wrote:
>If there's an underlying lesson, it's that the Web is all about doing
>a lot with a little; the HTML/HTTP/URI trio have to count as one of the
>great 80/20 point bullseyes in the history of technology.  With XML
>messaging and HTTP piping, you can sometimes do a whole lot remarkably
>quickly.

I like this story a lot, but I'm not convinced that the browser per se is
the result of this message.  I'd like to see a lot of different Internet
standards XML-ized (email, news, HTML, etc.), hopefully leading to a
simpler application development environment.  That doesn't mean that I want
to use a browser to read my email or my news - it just means that I want to
be able to ride along on similar techologies.  Somewhere along the line
browsers got big - I'd like to see them shrink down a _lot_, or at least
fragment into a lot of smaller pieces with limited dependencies.

And of course, in the meantime, it'll mean a lot of middleware.

We'll see.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

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