Stuff Needs To Flow

By Jon Udell

June 8, 2001

(The Universal Canvas :  Page 2 of 3 )

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The Universal Canvas Stuff Needs To Flow Ektron's eWebEditPro And eMPower

My argument is that universal representation of data in XML is as important as universal representation of Web-services APIs in XML, and for the same reason: stuff needs to flow. In the case of Web services, flow is a network effect that happens when services can trivially interconnect. If XML-RPC and SOAP are succeeding, it's because they reduce barriers to flow more effectively than CORBA/IIOP or DCOM have done. It should be the same with applications.

We want the network effect that happens when I can trivially connect a calculation, a table, an image, and a description -- from different sources -- and then share the results. The Web can achieve this effect, but not easily. Excel, Word, and Acrobat, built to achieve different goals, are the wrong tools for this job -- overkill on features, weak on integration. The Web's own writing tool, the HTML TEXTAREA widget, is conversely well-integrated (with the Web), but hopelessly inadequate in terms of features. What we've always needed, and what we still need, is the universal canvas -- a surface on which we view, but also create and edit, words and tables and charts and pictures.

Since IE4, Microsoft has been shipping a component that can be used to achieve at least some of the universal-canvas effect. It's called the DHTML edit control. If you've ever composed an HTML message in Outlook Express, you've used this component, perhaps to add styled text, tables, images, or hyperlinks to an e-mail message. Because it's a component, it can offer these same services to other applications. Recently, I've been in touch with two companies that are doing just that. Both offer content management systems "for the rest of us" -- that is, for the majority who do not need a Vignette-class hammer to pound a ZDNet-sized nail.

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