Kevin King wrote:
Having been on the board in a past life - for what little I did contribute - I can say that the U2UG board and volunteers work hard and should be commended for their efforts. That said, can we all please stay focused on the results without getting personal about it?
I've yet to get personal about anything relating to this. However, I'm free to voice my opinion on the subject since public inquiries were requested. I'm all for the project, provided the masses can actually use it.
Personally, I think this B&B thing is an excellent idea and I'm looking forward to taking a peek at it. I also think that we as an industry need to be more forward thinking in adopting web technology, and I'm pleased that the board is making strong moves in that direction. (And hey, for this worldwide group, it just makes good sense.)
Kevin, we both know the current state of the "industry". It is moving forward (slowly), but is this vendor-specific "forum" of comments really going to affect the rest of the industry? It's great for IBM and for U2 and I'm all for it. I have no interest in seeing any volunteer project fail, as I've seen plenty of my own get buried in the bit bucket from a lack of interest and/or lack of vision. We need to be realistic here, though. Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Fire Fox are just as popular as IE and are the preferred or only browser available on many desktops. Luckily, there is a fix for Fire Fox. What about all of the Mac users, though? Chrome is growing in popularity as well, so it can not be ignored. Look at the iPhone's explosion. It has Safari, not IE. Would it not be nice to be able to submit bug reports and feature requests from your iPhone, waiting at the airport? The same can be said for all web-capable mobile devices that don't run some mobile version of Windows, which is a large percentage.
This browser incompatibility issue rings oddly familiar, reminiscent of applications throughout history that only worked properly on Wyse50's or some other CRT. Anyone remember PROF on the old Reality systems? Early releases of that product were the poster child for terminal incompatibility (pun intended). And you know what? We worked through all that.
Yeah, we ended up using emulation software that could handle them all. A decade later the web grew up and became useful for businesses. There are browser emulators available, but the only people that really use those are web devs. I just don't buy your logic here.
Now we're faced with different "terminal emulators" going by the names of IE, FF, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and a few others. Sure, the whole connection method has changed - stateful telnet going the way of stateless http - yet at the most fundamental level, it's all just bits on a wire talking to some device on the other end. Too simple, you say? I disagree. It *is*simple. It's the same problems we've addressed before and that we will address again and again as the technology landscape evolves.
The difference here is that there _is_ (and has been for a long time) a standard and it's called W3C. There is no "incompatibility" unless you develop outside of the W3C standards. AJAX and various other Javascript-based development methods (JQuery is great!) can work with all W3C compliant browsers if the standards are followed. Some extra coding is required and some "features" may have to be dropped or simulated using other methods to implement the desktop-like features users want now. Heck XHTML is the standard now and all of the mentioned browsers support it along with AJAX and CSS. I think even Konquerer will properly run AJAX sites, provided the site doesn't use IE-only features.
Having established this context, I do have concerns about the premise that we need Microsoft technology to do the web properly or that Microsoft technologies give us something that we couldn't get any other way. Of course, the same could be said of IBM or Oracle or ... name any company here. As solution providers we need options, and therefore the best thing our vendors can do is to give us more options to do what we need to do as quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible. To that end, what the B&B group is doing is positive steps in the right direction. _______________________________________________
Yes. It's great, as a starting step. I just hate to see a ton of work go into a framework that is so browser restrictive.
GlenB _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list [email protected] http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
