RE: Brainstorming: Best of All Worlds

On: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 17:14:51 +0100
From: Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer wrote:

>Hello HTML WG, I would like to kick start discussion on whether  or not it is beneficial to think in terms of Best  of all >Worlds, including HTML5, Web Forms 2.0,  XHTML 1.0, Modularization of XHTML, XHTML 2 and  XForms.

I rather get the sense that our co-chairs may soon call a halt to our initial flurry of brainstorming and associated speculation about the best possible way to foster discussion about ... how to foster discussion about ... (oops...  please excuse my regression).
 
So, I just have to get in another penny or two before last call is issued.
 
I remember seeing this thread "best of all worlds" when it started. I got quite excited. Ahh.. thought I. "An opportunity at long last to actually put some ideas on the table." Alas,  the thread rapidly frayed. It dissolved into a collection of concerns: technical concerns, logistic concerns, concerns about how formal must an idea be before it can be submitted. Concerns about whether or not a concern was really a concern. "Why talk about solutions that have no problem?" "Why talk about problems that have no solution?"   Well if the mapping between solutions and problems is a bijection then, perhaps our work here is done and ready to be handed off to the robots.
 
But how unfulfilling that would be. How disserving to the possible futures would that be?
 
As a group we have succeeded already in exhausting one another with the volume and number of our thoughts. At times we have become impatient. So okay, that's cool. How about a little exercise in celebrating the end of brainstorming?
 
The recommendation of this group will not come into existence until 2010. As we begin to boil our sentiments into packages that present "usage cases" and examples and arguments and test cases and  schema and proposals-- clearly a requirement of any discussion that will have a practical outcome -- could we not engage in one brief frenzy of wild speculation?
 
What should the world wide web look like in five years and where does HTML fit in?
 
The collective talents assembled in this group would be a wee bit misspent, in my estimation, if we did not take the opportunity to co-visualize a bit at the outset of our endeavor.
 
A couple of months ago I became aware of this funny entity known as WHATWG.  "Web hypertext application technology working group" What a perfect name, I thought. "That's where the web is going. That is precisely what everyone should be working on" How can we get real application-level code running in the browser? We need to be able to copy and paste; we need to be able to save and load files; we need to be able to read and write pixels; we need to be able to have good asynchronous interchange with servers and with other clients; we need to have good client-side scripting; we need to be able to connect seamlessly to all that wondrously weird stuff the W3C has been working on -- the OWL's and XSLT's and Uncertainty Reasoning groups; we need to be able to twirl, dissolve, mutate, morph and fragment pictures, texts... and... ideas; we need to be able to give people tools to let them imagine. It all needs to happen in the browser. No plugins, no royalties, no per-seat costs. Humanity is the marketplace; humanity is the author.
 
That's how I remember it anyhow.
David Dailey

Received on Tuesday, 27 March 2007 04:10:14 UTC