|
Woefully, I don't think this project has been active for well over a year now. I thought it was a spiffy idea.
I think the association between web pages and XMLTerm isn't really that important. It's really solving a problem of the limited interaction command-line tools can do (at least in the Unix tradition). It's hard to pass everything as strings, seperated by newlines/spaces. It is hard to represent anything complex this way, and it is hard to have typed information -- everything is a string and meaning is based on context. Passing XML between programs is much more powerful.
The other advantage is the SGML manner of interpretting the information -- namely, ignore tags and attributes you don't understand. Basically it's a self-filter, but it also allows a program to deliver the full information is has without burdening the user with more information than necessary.
In the end this is all just about a method of programming -- currently done with sh/bash. Instead of functions and procedures we have programs. It's all kind of lame in a way. We are just starting to get vaguely OO with some of the metadata -- mime.types and such, defining handlers for different types of files, but not in an intelligent way -- cp should act as a handler for any file content, images may have multiple handlers for different methods... the most basic OO, but cutting edge for file managers. Piping and backticks are just ways to compose these functions.
I think the concept as programming-language-as-UI is a good one, and XMLTerm is one possibility. OTOH, there's lots of programming languages that already exist. One of those might be more sensible. I think this sorta leads to the dynabook, and perhaps some of what Squeak wishes to do (or at least Alan Kay).
| 
