>> I am not sure how this helps.  Either you have xml/html/style
>> interfaces and rely on the 'universal client'.  This is an
>> interesting area because it allows mixing of documents and multiple
>> presentations of an underlying data-source.  However, forget about
>> morphic.  Interaction, if possible at all, will only be through
>> standardized mechanisms such as event/scripting enabled SVG/XHTML,
>> which essentially means JavaScript.
>> 
...
>> 
>> What am I missing?
> 

To make real progress, everyone should be thinking much longer, on a much
higher level. HTML (and everything else about the web) is/will be the MS-DOS
of the next two decades--it will dominate, will not be abandoned so that
huge efforts will be spent on compatibility backwards, it will represent the
worst possible solution to the problems it addresses, and hold back progress
to an immense degree. XML (et al)? Jeez, it's just one of the first hacks to
remedy these things, within the original boundaries.

> I think Squeak is a little
> more powerful than JavaScript ... Also, Squeak always has "authoring
> turned on" so it opens vistas of "SuperSwikis" of active media that
> can be added to, etc.
> 
> .... and there are a variety of ways to deal with the existing web
> conventions.

HTML, XML, JavaScript, DHTML, BLAHABLAHATML, yadda yadda yadda. The best way
to predict the future is to ignore them :)

The advent of the web and these dinosaur technologies is a disaster. Ten
years ago we were using our computers to do productive work. Now we're back
to making them work again. Then, courses would teach people Quark XPress and
then about kerning, typefaces, point sizes, ligatures, and so on--real
useful skills and knowledge for graphic designers. Today they're having to
teach them Unix file system syntax and image representation formats so that
people can put images in their documents, which used to be done by cut &
paste back then. It's essentially a counterrevolution of the techies. Notice
that Linux, the great "new" thing formerly known as Unix, is 30+ years old,
HTML is a much poorer version of the 35 years old SGML, etc. etc. And the
advocates of this complain that Smalltalk, at a mere 25, is too old?

> I think the basic difference in point of view is that I don't see the
> existing OS's and web as being anything more than bad defacto
> standards that positively invite us to produce better alternatives

I obviously agree, but no one does who is willing to pay for it.
Essentially, everything being capitalized on the net today was invented as
part of the effort of going to the moon (via ARPA)! But hopefully the
situation will improve again, if the current indications of an e-commerce
reality check and so on are signs that people are beginning to switch on
their brains again.

> .... I certainly don't see them as anything that has to be catered to
> ....

To make real progress the existing stuff needs to be abandoned--so this
won't happen. Backward compatibility is the best way to hinder genuine
progress.

Watching the tape of what Engelbart had on a real, working system in '68,
makes you cry a few tears, seeing things that won't be in real use in the
next 10 or 20 years, easily.


>>  Most of the next billion machines are not going to be either Macs or PCs
>>  ..... but will certainly be connected to Internet.

I also hope that convergence/ubiquitous computing etc. really will happen,
and throw everything over as the personal computers did--but I see many
reasons why this won't happen; too many I think. At least not for a long
time--the PDAs and friends are still not nearly useful enough, for example.
What timeframe do you expect this to happen in? A billion computers implies
a rather long time.

> Well, Squeak is a client for its own media -- and this is what I'm
> most interested in -- you may have noticed that we can now "publish"
> whole projects, which can serve as a more active and media basis for
> representing ideas than simplistic html pages. We will release a
> bunch of these by the end of the summer.

Given these ambitions, I am surprised that there appear to be no ambitions
to addressing the usability of the stuff inside Squeak, and make it
accessible for 'real people', as in accessible to those without a major in
Smalltalk. 

Henrik