Marcel --

At 12:32 PM +0200 6/27/00, Marcel Weiher wrote:
>  > From: Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at disney.com>
>>
>>  Just a suggestion ...
>>
>>  Forget about the Mac or the PC, and concentrate on an Internet
>>  Interface. These have to be universal, and the current (mostly) html 
>>  ones are pretty rudimentary. This is fresh ground for new ideas. Most 
>>  of the next billion machines are not going to be either Macs or PCs 
>>  ..... but will certainly be connected to Internet.
>
>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.
>
>The other option is downloading your own client and executing there. 
>  Apart from the fact that I don't necessarily find this desirable, 
>you will have the same problem as before, that each platform will 
>have local interface conventions that you need to follow if you are 
>executing locally.
>
>What am I missing?

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. 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.

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

Cheers,

Alan