> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Barry Lee Brisco
> Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 1999 10:04 AM
> ... I will also freely admit I don't understand portal mania either.
>
> By it's very nature, the Net and the Web are "anti-portal". You can start
> anywhere and go anywhere from anywhere. Exactly what does a
> "portal" do for me? Nothing.
>
> My feeling is that next year, "portals" will be forgotten
This raises a question in my mind. Ever since I started doing web
stuff, about 5 years now, I've done a fair amount of fiddling around
with my own start-up/home page. It's now about 750 lines of HTML,
style sheets, and JavaScript, 600 links, all fitting into a single
non-scrolling, non-frame page. It includes such things as a pull-
down menu of 150 comic strips (Alley Oop to Ziggy), control panels
for my ISDN LAN modem, 200-CD changer, and home security system,
indices into my Memex, clock, calendar, etc. etc. Some parts of it
are generated dynamically by CGI code that goes out to get stock
prices, weather, and headlines. Other stuff is downloaded overnight
automatically, things like stats from several of my web sites and
various cartoons like Calvin & Hobbs, Doonsbury, User Friendly
(Btw, I download just the image files of these, not the ads and
other cruft around them, and display them double size).
Basically, it's my own private portal, with infinite customization.
Yahoo, Excite, and the others seem to me to be the same kind of thing,
but for people who don't want to do the work.
Do other people on this list do their own home page like this, or just
use one of the commercial portals or start-up pages?
It seems to me that the big portal sites will be in trouble when XML
really gets going, because people will be able to retrieve stuff from
all over in XML and then format it into a single home page. That is,
all the customization work that the portal sites do server-side will
be done on the local machine by JavaScript code. Users will buy or
download an application package that lets them do selections from
lists of net-available stuff, do drag-and-drop to arrange the page
the way they want it.
Bob Munck
Mill Creek Systems LC
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