RE: Green screen to GUI

I understand what you're saying, Rick, but you have to realize: none of
this stuff is actually standardized.  This isn't like disk I/O or 5250
communications or even, God help us, Bisync.  This is the exciting world
of the web: bloated, arcane, and inscrutable.

Look at a SOAP document (which us the underlying technology of Web
Services).  It is clearly a really poorly implemented
design-by-committee piece of junk.  It's got more overhead than a
pork-barrel political project, with required fields that shouldn't be
and default values for other fields which make no sense.  You could
strip out 50% of a SOAP message and still have lots of fat to cut.

There hasn't been a decently designed web protocol since the original
HTTP, and those that come close (such as XML-RPC) get squashed by
vendors like Microsoft, who insist on standards that require big,
complicated IDEs just to create a simple Hello World.

Anyway, I wish I could tell you it gets better, but it doesn't.  HTML is
relatively standardized, but JavaScript isn't.  Cascading Style Sheets
are also pretty solid, but frameworks packages bloom, wither and die in
a cycle sometimes measured in months.

As someone said, we're sort of in the VHS vs. Betamax stage, although I
liken it more to the pre-XMODEM days of async ommunications.  Back then
there were a gillion protocols all vying for position, and the simplest
actually won.  I hold less hope for the networked services community,
simply because it is dominated by theory-heavy committees, not
hands-dirty technicians, but that's just me.  <g>

Joe

 

> From: Rick DuVall
>
> I just hate spending my time wrestling with 'how does it really
> work and how can I make it work?' issues when in my mind the
> infrastructure of this web stuff should be exposed in a very
> obvious way.