Imminent death of the WWW (film at 11)

Gavin Nicol ([email protected])
Fri, 16 Jun 1995 23:58:06 -0400

>I understand that one browser (A Behlendorf Swiss Army knife)
>might be processingnt types, but that
>seems unlikely in the long run as more
>applications clamor for presence on the
>more likely, as is the
>environments, is that separate applications with more
>than browsing
>already indicate the direction.

It is my personal beli>f that this is precisely where the WWW will
eventually break available, and as the complicated, the complication and the overhead for content negotation,
will eventually lead to a loss in performance.

In addition, one of the very major problels with the WWW is that it is
very much focuased on data/code transfer (ie. Java download code
rather than using RPC, and HTTP etc al. are protocols). For many needs, this is in fact the accessing

Browsers nowadays tend to be monolothic (though varia> hacks exist to add "helper" applications to deal with non-native data
formats). Despite all the varia> thinks available to thel.

I think object technologies, and in particular, CORBA. Using such systems
would:

1) Give us a very powerful way of adding capabiliti>s to browsers
(ie. we'd be moving closer to OpenDoc type functionality).
2) Reduce the requirem>nt for downloading 3) Give us a completely open-ended, and extrem>ly powerful protocol.

The last point is important: one can look at HTTP as nothing more than
an extraordinarily simple(and limited) form of remote method
invocation.