> So, what kinds of strategies can anyone suggest to > take this beyond the "consensus reality" barrier?
Start with the unparalleled interactivity & performance of REAL software like MetaCard, versus mere web-browser based access to HTML + JavaScript. For example: once the web page is rendered, can you move things around? *NO*. It's a fundamentally static interface. With MC, OTOH, you can move things around at will, do drag-and-drop, view [scripted] object-oriented drawings and animations, trap all keyboard keys, have a custom menubar, update other stacks relationally ... Try doing any of this with the all-too-popular web-based HTML + JavaScript stuff! > The answer is typically "Well, that's nice, but > you are not going to reach as many people... It all depends on your marketing strategies and tactics, methinks. Adobe Acrobat pulled it off, didn't they! Look at it thir way. Provide the Reader freely. People DL it once and forget it. When you click on a ".pdf" link in the Web, the PDF document is automatically opened with the Acrobat Reader program/plugin. Simple. Still very web-based given that its still going on in the vicinity of your familiar web-browser (e.g. argument to placate your detractors). Same goes for MetaCard! You can auto-DL stacks on the fly ... If you don't tell em it's MC, the users will probably think that you are providing them with high-performance Java applets! ;-) > How many are going to download your plugin? Download the player once, forget thereafter; your web experience, while remaining familiar, will be immensely more stimulating, interactive, and so on, and so on ... than ever before. Here's a further idea to make it even simpler: you might want to design into your stacks the ability to automatically and transparently contact your server in order to auto-update itself whenever necessary e.g. instead of pestering the user to manually update on a periodic basis like many programs/plugins do. > You still have to get them to go via a > browser and download your stuff... This is a spurious argument, especially given my above suggestions. Besides, you could also use your custom MC-clients as web-savvy programs that the user may not even know is a "web" program. Imagine for a moment, as I do, a widely distributed network of MC clients and servers acting as one collective distributed entity. Or, more usually, imagine what this could do for your LAN and/or Intranet. > Why not just put it up in html > in the first place. With HTML, content, content-structure, presentation and interactivity are all intertwined. The least they could do for flexibility and inter-operability is to code the content with XML. In which case, you also have to deal with the CSS and some other related W3C technologies and standards. In which case, it's more complicated to do it this way than the xCard way, and far less *reusable*. In stack form, you can output your content as HTML, XML, in database format, as a CGI, and so on. It's time for all xCards to show their colours and take their right-honorable-place on the podium of excellence, and consequently somewhat displacing the lowest-common-denominator that we have grown used to since 1995, but all for the better! Persuaded yet? ;-) Alain Farmer xCard fanatic PS: I should probably mention that in addition to all of the above, the Java version of FreeCard will be able to be embedded into web-pages in the same manner that Java applets are. No separate program or plugin; the stack in a portion of the web-page. Or vice-versa, I am told, so that we will be able to browse the web inside a widget of the stack's interface. Yup! the web from *within* a stack. __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard