Albeit a focus (presentation of content) of much attention in this forum, flash concerns itself with a proprietary presentation of content. With distributed architectures and information being shared amongst customers business and their business partners, the true virtues of XML have been establishing standardized interchanges of data abstracted from proprietary technology. Flash is merely a 'flashy' window into this data. It's also debatable if flash is the medium to deliver information rich content, which is different from media rich technology. Most all successful information rich web sites are text. I'm straying on your point, but would flash make Ebay or Google any better? Google on my phone would be nice, via XML and WAP. But you may also design a call center application in VXML. Also think about search engines indexing an information rich site based on a raw xml tree. This is not possible in flash. So even when considering it's presentation capabilities tools like flash are really limited.
Often when you commit to a technology in business, it's not necessarily that it's the most cost effective in the short run, but one that you believe will give you strategic advantages in the future. Committing to XML is powerful in the sense the content is truly isolated from the presentation. The truth is that you have a point, we're a bit on the bleeding edge of some of this technology. I've learned Perl and Java, why must I again expend brain cells with the syntax of XSL/XSLT. It's much more limiting I much rather code with logic than XSL tags. It's analagous to hand-coding html pages.. The truth is like development of HTML tools, more and more tools will be based on XML technologies and ameliorate some of the current development issues surrounding XSL, XSLT. Miguel Navarro Redbillows Consulting 5080 Judsonville Drive Antioch, CA 94509 phone: 650-533-6939 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
