Group items tagged

Companies building websites should beware of proprietary rich-media technologies like Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight, the founder of Mozilla Europe has warned. Speaking at the Internet World conference in London on Tuesday, Tristan Nitot claimed such applications threaten the open nature of the internet because the companies behind them could "have an agenda". While he conceded that Flash was currently necessary for consistently displaying content such as video, he suggested that the upcoming revision of the HTML specification would make it unnecessary to use proprietary technology.

good interview with Kevin Lynch about the future of the Web. Covers AIR, Flex, Flash, Silverlight and how the Web is moving from universal access and exchange of documents to that of applications. Lynch places Adboe products into a larger context of which problems these inventions solved. The new problem is that of expanding the Web to the desktop through these emerging universal applications.

Companies building websites should beware of proprietary rich-media technologies like Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight, the founder of Mozilla Europe has warned. Speaking at the Internet World conference in London on Tuesday, Tristan Nitot claimed such applications threaten the open nature of the internet because the companies behind them could "have an agenda".

Silverlight Wikipedia description

A browser plug-in for JavaFX will be featured in the Java SE (Standard Edition) 6 Update 10 release due this fall. Both Adobe, with its Flash platform, and Microsoft, with Silverlight, are offering plug-in platforms for rich Internet applications. But Sun plans to provide the industry-leading rich client with JavaFX, said Param Singh, Sun senior director of Java marketing. The Java runtime helps make this possible, he stressed during an interview at the JavaOne conference on Thursday afternoon. "The Java runtime is on over 900 million desktops today," Singh said. Every month, there are 40 million downloads of updates to the Java runtime, he said. Additionally, there are more than 2.2 mobile phones with Java on them, not to mention Java's presence in 100 percent of Blu-ray devices, said Singh. "The notion is, we will take JavaFX where the Java runtime is available," Singh said. Sun's JavaFX plug-in will enable deployment of applications that can work either in or outside of the browser, Singh said. This ability to run applications inside or outside of a browser is similar to what Adobe is offering with its AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) software.

The IOWA Comes vs. Microsoft antitrust suit evidence is now publicly available. This ZDNet Talkback posts an extraordinary eMail from Bill Gates concerning the need to control MSOffice formats and protocols as Microsoft pushes onto the Web. The key point is that Chairman Bill understands that the real threat to Microsoft is that of Open Web formats and protocols outside of Microsoft's control. It's 1998, and the effort to "embrace and eXtend" W3C HTML, XHTML, SVG and CSS isn't working well. The good Chairman notifies the troops that MSOffice must come up with another plan. Interestingly, it's not until 2001, when OpenOffice releases an XML encoding of the OpenOffice/StarOffice imbr that Microsoft finally sees a solution! (imbr = in-memory-binary-representation) The MSOffice crew immediately sets to work creating a similar XML encoding of the MSOffice binary (imbr) dump. The first result is released in the MSOffice 2003 beta as "WordprocessingML and SpreadsheetML". XML was designed as a structured language for creating specific structured languages. OpenOffice saw the potential of using XML to create an OpenOffice specific XML language. MSOffice seized the innovation and the rest is history. Problem solved! So what was the "problem" the good Chairman identified in this secret eMail? It's that the Web is the future, and Microsoft needed to find a way of leveraging their existing desktop document "editor" monopoly share into owning and controlling the Web formats produced by Microsoft applications. MSOffice OOXML is the result. ISO approval of MSOffice OOXML is beyond important to Microsoft. It establishes MSOffice "editors" as standards compliant. It also establishes the application, platform and vendor specific MSOffice OOXML as an international "open" standard. Many will ask why this isn't a case of Microsoft actually opening up the MSOffice formats in compliance with government antitrust demands. It is "compliance", but not in the sense of what

Adobe's Erik Larson introduces Acrobat.com. His blog comments echo his post in response to an article at ComputerWorld: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9091678 In the CW article, Guy Creese of the Burton Group holds the line, defending, as expected, the Microsoft alighnment of MSOffice, Exchange and SharePoint.

Perpetuating current data silos by continuing to "give your data to a site" was, Berners-Lee asserted, "not ideal." He argued instead for wider adoption of new or existing Web specifications such as OAuth and RDFAuth, enabling the individual to store data relevant to themselves wherever they felt fit, and assemble it at will within one or more Web and local applications of their choosing at the point of need. "Acquaintance-based social networks," Berners-Lee suggested, were "the tip of the iceberg," with his notion of the emerging Giant Global Graph "exist[ing] above the Web" and creating opportunities for far richer functional and role-based interconnections. Turning to consideration of the Web itself, Berners-Lee remarked that "Openness tends to be an inexorable movement through time" He juxtaposed the 'Web Application Platform' with proprietary solutions to parts of the problem such as Flash, AIR and Silverlight. This Web Application Platform, he argued, relies upon W3C specifications and other open standards, and it is increasingly moving toward specifications that are small, modular, and interoperable. Moving toward his conclusion, Berners-Lee reiterated the importance of Linked Data again saying "Linked Open Data is the Web done as it should be." Returning to his earlier discussion of modularity, he suggested that existing specifications such as those for JavaScript be reworked, carving JavaScript's functionality up into a series of modular packages. Each of those packages should then be assigned a URI, and the Semantic Web should be used to describe the packages, their dependencies, and their interrelationships. Used in conjunction with the resulting applications, Linked Data would provide, "elements of an ability to do things [with data] that cross application boundaries." Turning to Q&A, Berners-Lee was first asked to comment on the concept of 'Web 2.0′, which he did; "Web 2.0 sites a

And of course it is the incredible variety in data formats used by Web 2.0 apps that forces the creation of new data silos on the Web. Web 2.0 is bringing us the same kinds of incompatible data format issues forced on software users since the beginning of the proprietary software industry.

Brian figures out that the document wars are really about Cloud Computing. Big vendors IBM, Sun, Google and Microsoft are jockeyign for position in our cloud computing future. And this is why Microsoft MUSt get ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML! What Brian misses is the key to a Microsoft Cloud that can be found int he MSOffice SDK; the OOXML<>XAML conversion component. XAML, Silverlight and Smart Tags replace W3C XHTML-CSS, SVG-Flash, and RDF. Makign the MS Cloud one where Microsoft owned protocols, formats and .NET components dominate all processes. ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML establishes MSOffice as a standards "editor", thus masking the cloud computing shift to XAML. A shift that will lock out all other Web 2.0 - Cloud providers dependent on Open Web - W3C protocols and formats!

Note that Brian posted this article in February, on the eve of the Geneva BRM. Since then ISO has gone on to approve MSOffice-OOXML. Note also that, a week prior to this publication, i had sent Brian a lengthy discussion entitled "Windows can't do Cloud Computing", where all of these issues were discussed except for the IBM motivations. Not wanting to interfere with the upcoming Geneva BRM and vote, I had declined Brian's request to publish.

But Sun CTO Bob Brewin emphasized in an interview that JavaFX Script features a new set of capabilities such as allowing development of applications that can be moved outside the browser. JavaFX Script also is designed for content authors, not necessarily developers alone. ... With JavaFX and the Java 6 Update 10 release, also called Consumer JRE (Java Runtime Environment), developers can deploy applications to browsers and have applets dragged out onto the desktop. Brewin also filled in details about Sun's cloud services effort, called Project Hydrazine. It is to feature an infrastructure enabling developers to run services on the Web such as mapping, location, calendaring, and e-mail services. Due next year, Hydrazine is to be part of Sun's network.com grid infrastructure. Also part of Hydrazine is Project Insight, which will measure who is visiting Web sites. Developers will be able to find who is using their service and perhaps could deliver targeted advertising. Hydrazine combines attributes offered in Microsoft's Live Mesh data folder-sharing service, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Web-based service and Google Analytics, Brewin said.