Entries Tagged 'Software' ↓

seems to be the link to David Heller’s article over at Boxes and Arrows: HTML’s Time is Over. Let’s Move On. He writes, “Ultimately, I donft see a long term future for HTML as an application development solution. It is a misapplied tool that was never meant to be used for anything other than distributed publishing.” Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to be misinterpreting that as saying there’s no future for (X)HTML, period. It’s not. He’s talking about a much much narrower field than that: enterprise application development.

For those kinds of applications, and such applications alone, he’s right on the mark. In a more general sense, however, HTML is not dead at all - which I hope is precisely why Heller limited himself to a much narrower subject. The web grew in spite of enterprise application developers, not because of them. The web grew - and continues to thrive - because it required NO dev tools beyond Notepad or (in the day) TeachText. Anyone who forgets that (or never learned it) does so at their peril.

teenager Jon Johansen over the creation of DeCSS, the software he made so that he could watch DVDs on his Linux box rather than an industry-vetted player. The judge stated very strongly that as long as a DVD is legally obtained, no one could dictate which machine could be used to use it. Looks like a showdown will be coming on these issues between Europe and the US.

at Macworld has been over for a while now; they unveiled some very interesting things today. Most interesting to me in the short term is Safari, Apple’s new browser. As well, an Apple-born X11 system which is interesting to folks from the Unix world, a super-sized 17″ Powerbook and a super-small 12″ Powerbook as well. Jobs understands that the middle ground in laptops is cluttered - either end of the spectrum is where the good stuff lives. Also: 802.11g is being called Airport Extreme, they have released Jobs’ own pet software, Keynote, and some other stuff.

Maybe some of the huge announcements of past Keynotes were missing, but I like this one anyhow. It has that feeling of taking care of business.

in the near-constant back and forth about weblogs and their merits or lack thereof. Captain Cursor’s analysis is quite different than the one I wrote the other night, but I do agree with him that the software does play a role in defining what people do with spaces like this. I don’t really see, however, that there’s anything intrinsic to either Blogger or Manila that suggests shorter posts or links as the jumping-off point for the stuff a weblogger writes. In fact, out of the box it’s probably easier to use Blogger to publish longer pieces with no links. And Manila, although well configured for weblogs at Userland’s publicly hosted sites, is still most at home at a site-wide content management tool, at least if Frontier 5 (its predecessor, the last version I used extensively) was any indication. The influence of Blogger and Manila, to me, has a more important influence on the answer to the preliminary question - will I or won’t I?

on the issue of software patents: Simson Garfinkel, Patently Absurd, Wired 2.07.

Dave Winer discusses the software patent issue more in Scripting News today in No More Pesos for Senor Bezos. He also refers to a really nice article by Seth Shulman on the subject - Software Patents Tangle the Web.