My brain hurts...
I was reading the XForms homepage when Jack's email about rm -d ms came. So
I went there and read that too.
How does anyone keep up? There is so much going on. And these are things
that can be built on. Doug talks about a capabilities infrastructure. It
seems like lots of people could stay busy just tracking extant software
capabilities so we (and others) could more easily find things we could hook
together. I had only recently started exploring the Java Apache site before
I mentioned it the other day. They have a portal (Jetspeed), a mail server
(JAMES), a FAQ manager (FAQ-O-Matic), a CVS server, all built on top of
their servlet engine (JServ). It sounds like useful stuff, but who has the
time to get up to speed on all that?
XForms is W3's attempt to improve HTML Forms. HTML Forms are ok if you think
HTML is ok. The HTML user interface is pretty sparse: no double-clicking, no
keyboard shortcuts, etc... One of the goals of XForms is to support a richer
user interface. Another is to split data and presentation into separate
layers. XForms will work with XSL, the XML Stylesheet Language, to control
presentation. The third layer in the XForms model is logic. XForms will
support scripts that check data in the browser as it is entered. Like
Apache, w3.org is a high visibility group with lots of developer support:
just the sort of people it might pay to get hooked up with (Jon still out
there?).
rm -d ms is the Richmen's Document Management System. Their approach appears
to be to make everything look like an XML document. That way it can be
accessed through the DOM and have stylesheets applied to it for display. One
could also then use XLink/XPointer/XPath, I guess. They are building an
application server on this idea. Their main page also mentions something
called "Castor". This is apparently a project to DOMify SQL. That is, it
would make the contents of a relational database look like an XML document
through the DOM. Would this be an example of what you guys mean by
"Distributed DOM"?
Bill (wearing a hat to keep his head together...)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri May 12 2000 - 09:43:47 PDT