Backward compatibility is more viable (sustainable)
with stacks than with HTML pages. A stack is
equivalent to a complete site, yet far more flexible
than the dozens or hundreds of corresponding web
pages. A stack can/will be scripted to re-purpose the
existing content, casting the content in several
forms: HTML, XML, textfiles, database records,
reports, CGI program; individually, or any mix that
you wish. New formats can also be scripted as they
become available, relevant, popular... without fussing
with the content at all and without disrupting the
other formats either.

I agree with you that people do upgrade when they have
a good reason and a reasonable of success. It's
evolution! My conviction is that we have the
upper-hand in terms of potential, but I suppose that
we the xCard community has not made its case
persuasively enough. Not yet that is!  Ignorance of
the superiority of our xCard approach must be
countered with more communication, and hopefully my
last 3 messages to this list have contributed to this,
albeit in a very small way. You can quote my
ramblings, if you wish, in other forums. As it is, I
am preaching to the converted, eh!
Hmm, you seem to forget one little detail. MC is not a stagnant environment and evolves as well, creating compatibility issues of its own as new versions are coming out. A trivial example of something very real (I ran into this myself just recently): if you happen to use 2.4.3 and use the "slash" constant that it supports, your stack won't work correctly with 2.4.1. Will you expect everyone to upgrade to the newest MC always? This is equivalent of asking everyone to abandon Netscape 4.x and move to 7 (I think they are still more people using 4.x than 7). The bottom line: things are not that trivial in wide open world :)

Ronert
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