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Oh yeah?
Go read the html spec, fuckwit

Konqueror will soon come to a roadblock. Their HTML layout code it uses takes shortcuts that prevent them from implementing interesting things like DOM access to CSS, DOM animation, and even HTML 4.0. Let's take a short tour, of test cases that have been developed by the W3C, and some for testing Mozilla:

• Does Konq grok Basic CSS1 font properties? Not quite.
• Backgrounds on line boxes? No.
• Word spacing? No.
• FLoat and clear? Ack, dataloss!
• How is Konq's whitespace handling? Terrible!

• Does Konq understand Simple CSS borders?: No.
• Does Konq know how to Render styled tables? Not really.
• Does Konq have a robust CSS parser? Not by a long shot.
• Can Konq Style the HTML and body elements? No.
• What about Positioning the background image?. Eh, no.
• Z-index? Not.

Prefer some real-world sites? How about a site for HTML writers who are sick and tired of broken browsers like Konqueror? Here's something totally stupid, but cool. How about another goofy test that Konqueror butchers?

Mozilla has a large set of tests that it fails, too, but it is much smaller than Konqueror's. As a web monkey today, supporting Konqueror is in the same league as supporting Netscape 4.7. If Konqueror ever becomes standards-compliant, then it will be useful, but until then it will be just another on a large pile of browsers that are getting left behind by new, innovative content.

Konqueror will soon come to a roadblock. Their HTML layout code it uses takes shortcuts that prevent them from implementing interesting things like DOM access to CSS, DOM animation, and even HTML 4.0. Let's take a short tour, of test cases that have been developed by the W3C, and some for testing Mozilla:

• Does Konq grok Basic CSS1 font properties? Not quite.
• Backgrounds on line boxes? No.
• Word spacing? No.
• FLoat and clear? Ack, dataloss!
• How is Konq's whitespace handling? Terrible!

• Does Konq understand Simple CSS borders?: No.
• Does Konq know how to Render styled tables? Not really.
• Does Konq have a robust CSS parser? Not by a long shot.
• Can Konq Style the HTML and body elements? No.
• What about Positioning the background image?. Eh, no.
• Z-index? Not.

Prefer some real-world sites? How about a site for HTML writers who are sick and tired of broken browsers like Konqueror? Here's something totally stupid, but cool. How about another goofy test that Konqueror butchers?

Mozilla has a large set of tests that it fails, too, but it is much smaller than Konqueror's. As a web monkey today, supporting Konqueror is in the same league as supporting Netscape 4.7. If Konqueror ever becomes standards-compliant, then it will be useful, but until then it will be just another on a large pile of browsers that are getting left behind by new, innovative content.

Konqueror will soon come to a roadblock. Their HTML layout code it uses takes shortcuts that prevent them from implementing interesting things like DOM access to CSS, DOM animation, and even HTML 4.0. Let's take a short tour, of test cases that have been developed by the W3C, and some for testing Mozilla:

• Does Konq grok Basic CSS1 font properties? Not quite.
• Backgrounds on line boxes? No.
• Word spacing? No.
• FLoat and clear? Ack, dataloss!
• How is Konq's whitespace handling? Terrible!

• Does Konq understand Simple CSS borders?: No.
• Does Konq know how to Render styled tables? Not really.
• Does Konq have a robust CSS parser? Not by a long shot.
• Can Konq Style the HTML and body elements? No.
• What about Positioning the background image?. Eh, no.
• Z-index? Not.

Prefer some real-world sites? How about a site for HTML writers who are sick and tired of broken browsers like Konqueror? Here's something totally stupid, but cool. How about another goofy test that Konqueror butchers?

Mozilla has a large set of tests that it fails, too, but it is much smaller than Konqueror's. As a web monkey today, supporting Konqueror is in the same league as supporting Netscape 4.7. If Konqueror ever becomes standards-compliant, then it will be useful, but until then it will be just another on a large pile of browsers that are getting left behind by new, innovative content.

Konqueror will soon come to a roadblock. Their HTML layout code it uses takes shortcuts that prevent them from implementing interesting things like DOM access to CSS, DOM animation, and even HTML 4.0. Let's take a short tour, of test cases that have been developed by the W3C, and some for testing Mozilla:

• Does Konq grok Basic CSS1 font properties? Not quite.
• Backgrounds on line boxes? No.
• Word spacing? No.
• FLoat and clear? Ack, dataloss!
• How is Konq's whitespace handling? Terrible!

• Does Konq understand Simple CSS borders?: No.
• Does Konq know how to Render styled tables? Not really.
• Does Konq have a robust CSS parser? Not by a long shot.
• Can Konq Style the HTML and body elements? No.
• What about Positioning the background image?. Eh, no.
• Z-index? Not.

Prefer some real-world sites? How about a site for HTML writers who are sick and tired of broken browsers like Konqueror? Here's something totally stupid, but cool. How about another goofy test that Konqueror butchers?

Mozilla has a large set of tests that it fails, too, but it is much smaller than Konqueror's. As a web monkey today, supporting Konqueror is in the same league as supporting Netscape 4.7. If Konqueror ever becomes standards-compliant, then it will be useful, but until then it will be just another on a large pile of browsers that are getting left behind by new, innovative content.

Konqueror will soon come to a roadblock. Their HTML layout code it uses takes shortcuts that prevent them from implementing interesting things like DOM access to CSS, DOM animation, and even HTML 4.0. Let's take a short tour, of test cases that have been developed by the W3C, and some for testing Mozilla:

• Does Konq grok Basic CSS1 font properties? Not quite.
• Backgrounds on line boxes? No.
• Word spacing? No.
• FLoat and clear? Ack, dataloss!
• How is Konq's whitespace handling? Terrible!

• Does Konq understand Simple CSS borders?: No.
• Does Konq know how to Render styled tables? Not really.
• Does Konq have a robust CSS parser? Not by a long shot.
• Can Konq Style the HTML and body elements? No.
• What about Positioning the background image?. Eh, no.
• Z-index? Not.

Prefer some real-world sites? How about a site for HTML writers who are sick and tired of broken browsers like Konqueror? Here's something totally stupid, but cool. How about another goofy test that Konqueror butchers?

Mozilla has a large set of tests that it fails, too, but it is much smaller than Konqueror's. As a web monkey today, supporting Konqueror is in the same league as supporting Netscape 4.7. If Konqueror ever becomes standards-compliant, then it will be useful, but until then it will be just another on a large pile of browsers that are getting left behind by new, innovative content.

Do you really want to only be able to run MS Internet Explorer? The reason standards exist is so that no one firm can be a monopoly in a marketplace.

I want market choices. "Catering to the biggest group of users" isn't choice. It is stupidity, not to mention against ADA.

-- Multics

That's what i'm trying to say, SVG is here NOW! Just because it hasn't yet been ratified as an official standard doesn't mean it isn't a very well implemented and useable tool, today. In fact, the on thing the W3C is waiting for before ratification is implementation experience.

Tools? Here!. Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, Jasc WebDraw, KIllustrator, Gnome's Nautilus/Gill/Dia, and the list goes on and on!

You are right though, when people think of animated web sites, they do think of Flash. I think with time, SVG will change that. SVG is more web-centric, having been desiged around DOM scripting and CSS support is the clincher. If any technology is cool enough to fight the uphill battle againsed Flash, SVG is it. There are even Flash to SVG converters already (see link above).

I am using SVG today, and I am happy with it. Before writing it off, take a day to play around with it and Adobe's plugin (by far the best and most complete implementation /so/far/).

SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics.
Graphics in XML, and is a standard from the W3C (or will be soon :-).
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8

If you haven't played with SVG, I highly recommend taking a look. Not only does it make it easy to author graphics in a text editor, but you can generate them with XSLT, or even better, programatically in code. Besides the powerfull integrated animation features, they expose a DOM so you can script them with Javascript (or eventually in Mozilla with Python, Perl, etc). Let's not forget the main feature, that they are scalable...so they can scale from a handheld screen size, up to a 2025 model 8000x6000 resolution monitor - allowing you to author truly device independent sites. Oh, and like any good web technology they are accessible too, and the text can be extracted from the graphics for text only dispay (you can even copy and paste right off the screen). Another great thing is that you style them with the same CSS style sheets you do your web site, so you can change the colors and styling of your graphics along with your HTML. Oh, and don't forget you can create SVG font files too!

I will also plug Adobe, who if you are running Windows or Mac (not Linux :-(, have released version 2 of their fantastic SVG viewer, which has brilliant conformance for such an emerging standard.
Anyhow, forget Flash, check out SVG!

A final recommendation is to use a server that supports HTTP keep-alive: saving the overhead of establishing a new TCP/IP connection for every "hit" cuts latency dramatically. The experienced response time to load a page often drops to about half by using keep-alive.

Yet most dynamic content systems don't do keep-alive. What have we learned since 1997?

That is such utter BS, not to mention flamebait. Run the page through the official W3 validator and you'll see LinuxToday is loaded with errors. It's their own damn fault if it doesn't load properly.

BTW, if you dislike M$ so much, why are you using Hotmail?

Try this w3.org's Web page.

I haven't found any way to keep CAD files up to date for even five years

Why not get (or make) a filter that converts CAD files to the XML-based SVG format?

An interesting mention about style sheets on this page about the NeXT browser/editor TBL was demonstrating...

Even if that wasn't in the same context as what we've come to use as CSS now, I wonder why the separation of content from presentation took so long to come around (and is STILL not 100% properly implemented by major browsers) and how it got so far off track around, say, 1996 and the 2.0 browsers.

If everyone can make any links he wants, doesn't the whole thing become a hopeless mess?

yes :)

At the moment, the links I see for both GPL and BSD point to the /. front page. It sure seems like these Perl hackers have a hard time with HTML...

There are a couple of systems that already exist. XwingML builds Java Swing interfaces from an XML specification. XUL is a similar XML-based markup supported by Mozilla. XForms is the W3C's draft standard for the next generation of web forms.

Most particularly you may want to look at UIML, which is intended as a cross-(viewing-)platform markup, supporting PCs, PDAs, etc. There is a Java viewer, and the new version seems to have some renderers for WML and HTML, but a text renderer should be possibe (if not already available).

There are several other lesser-known XML-to-GUI toolkits, such as KUIL and AUIT. Most of these are implemented in Java and map the Java Swing classes into XML (as with XwingML).

...and then Tim went ahead and got the work done: it's called PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection. And yes, I talked with him about it <A NAME="thud!"> (waay back when, when he had time...) and yes, we agreed that a proper filtering system must ba able, for example, to allow blocking sanctimonious religious BS as easily as the left-handed mouse stuff.

The W3C folk being who they are, PICS is a full-blown metadata schema. It'll do mysterious things, as soon as I get my head round the spec. Another language to learn...

...and then Tim went ahead and got the work done: it's called PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection. And yes, I talked with him about it <A NAME="thud!"> (waay back when, when he had time...) and yes, we agreed that a proper filtering system must ba able, for example, to allow blocking sanctimonious religious BS as easily as the left-handed mouse stuff.

The W3C folk being who they are, PICS is a full-blown metadata schema. It'll do mysterious things, as soon as I get my head round the spec. Another language to learn...

... On the math side, recognizing mathematical notation will be very hard, and would require a lot of work in user interfaces.

I dont have any suggestions for recognition, but display (and possible manipulation) could be MathML. The W3C page describes MathML as ...

....a low-level specification for describing mathematics as a basis for machine to machine communication. It provides a much needed foundation for the inclusion of mathematical expressions in Web pages

Go to the MathML tools page for software tools and specs.

... On the math side, recognizing mathematical notation will be very hard, and would require a lot of work in user interfaces.

I dont have any suggestions for recognition, but display (and possible manipulation) could be MathML. The W3C page describes MathML as ...

....a low-level specification for describing mathematics as a basis for machine to machine communication. It provides a much needed foundation for the inclusion of mathematical expressions in Web pages

Go to the MathML tools page for software tools and specs.

The Semantic Web doesn't need XML Schema, I've never heard TBL say that it does, and XML Schema is certainly not a sufficient condition for the SW !

TBL seems to have an obsession with XML namespaces as a solution to everything (look at the big SVG "roadmap" in his WWW10 conference slides) and lately he seems to be taking an "Agents with Everything" line.

The Semantic Web doesn't need XML Schema, I've never heard TBL say that it does, and XML Schema is certainly not a sufficient condition for the SW !

TBL seems to have an obsession with XML namespaces as a solution to everything (look at the big SVG "roadmap" in his WWW10 conference slides) and lately he seems to be taking an "Agents with Everything" line.

What we are waiting for is XQuery, that will hopefully make a big difference :-)

You might want to have a look at Kweelt which claim to (and I quote) "implements a query language for XML that satisfies all the requirements from the W3C query-language-requirements"

Is this what you're waiting for?

Well there's always one thing... there is no way to make good use of it yet ;)
XML (at current) doesnt have a query language, which means you dont have that much to use XML for. Sure you can repressent documents, and with stylesheets rewrap them into a design of your choise, but large-scale use are yet to come.

What we are waiting for is XQuery, that will hopefully make a big difference :-)

<!ATTLIST languages
another CDATA #IMPLIED
2learn CDATA #IMPLIED
e-dtype CDATA #FIXED
"enough-is-eno ugh"
a-dtype CDATA #FIXED
"pubdate date
binding length">

Read the press release:

"The third part is a primer, which explains what schemas are, how they differ from DTDs, and how someone builds a schema."

--

Machines get broken into not because they are "UNIX-like" or because they are "Windows-like" but because their network services have bugs. Most of the time, those are bugs in server code, not in the kernel...Reasoning that goes like "MacOS X is UNIX-like, therefore MacOS X will be susceptible to UNIX-like security problems" is simply not very informed.

I'm not by any means an XML guru, but your comment prompted my curiosity and I decided to go through the XML Schema tutorial. I noticed the following line at the beginning of their first example:

<xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

Which would still seem to imply the need for an existing standards file.

--

here

See this for info on Resource Description Framework... with XML becoming so huge, we are going to have so many new acronyms, huh?

Well, that isn't correct. XML is a markup language (eXtensible Markup Language) which very well can be used to repressent both structured and unstructured data.

It all depends on what query language you use for XML, there are serveral different right now.

For unstructured data (parsing and transforming documents) XSL, XQL etc are useful.

For structured data, check out XML-QL.

Well, that isn't correct. XML is a markup language (eXtensible Markup Language) which very well can be used to repressent both structured and unstructured data.

It all depends on what query language you use for XML, there are serveral different right now.

For unstructured data (parsing and transforming documents) XSL, XQL etc are useful.

For structured data, check out XML-QL.

Well, that isn't correct. XML is a markup language (eXtensible Markup Language) which very well can be used to repressent both structured and unstructured data.

It all depends on what query language you use for XML, there are serveral different right now.

For unstructured data (parsing and transforming documents) XSL, XQL etc are useful.

For structured data, check out XML-QL.

HTML has a lot of white-space insensitivity. If you use a simple MD5 hash on the serialization, it will see many versions of the same page as "different", even though their core content isn't. Generally this isn't an issue (generation algorithms (and thus trivial space) don't change much), but it's still a design consideration.

Where this does start to make a difference, canonicalization before hashing fixes many of these problems. This is how the XML Sig hashes work. It's another reason why XHTML (or at least, authoring HTML as syntactically well-formed XML, even if it's invalid according to the DTD) is often a good idea.

To go back to HTML, really useful versioning and change spotting needs to ignore banner ads, generation timestamp comments and other superfluous crud. Semantically aware markup and a suitable stripper in the canonicalizer can make it work even better. Of course it now depends on both client and server having consistent goals; a server might not want you to ignore changes in their banner ads.

I did a quick seatch, this may also be interesting:
www.w3.org/TR/WD-Micropayment-Mark

Micropayment is the best way I think, instead of getting 2ct from a banner, you might as well get 1ct directly from the user.

Isn't this just doing stuff similar to what strong validators a là Entity Tags in HTTP requests and responses use for determining whether a page has been changed (i.e. is in the cache) or not?

The only difference I can see is that they generate an Etag like entity for tect highlighted by the user as well as the entire webpage. Doesn't seem worthy of a patent though.

--

Isn't this just doing stuff similar to what strong validators a là Entity Tags in HTTP requests and responses use for determining whether a page has been changed (i.e. is in the cache) or not?

The only difference I can see is that they generate an Etag like entity for tect highlighted by the user as well as the entire webpage. Doesn't seem worthy of a patent though.

--

From the site (to be precise, http://users.shore.net/~ndm/java/mmexplorer/mmset. html):

You will need a browser that supports the "font face" HTML command and has access to the Symbol font. [...] The formula "j R j" should show up as "phi arrow phi". If you see "jRj" or if you see some kind of dark diamond between two phi's then you will not be able to view these pages properly.

This is a particularly bad way of displaying mathematical formulae, because the meaning of the text depends in a very messy way on the layout (i.e., what font it is in). It shouldn't be the case that just looking at a formula in a different font renders it completely meaningless.

The pleasant way to use mathematical symbols online is using Unicode. The unicode character set, which is supported by all common web browsers including Netscape 4, contains all the symbols a mathematician could want (indeed, arguably, all the symbols anyone could want), such as GREEK SMALL LETTER PHI, RIGHTWARDS ARROW, DIAMOND OPERATOR, LEFT NORMAL FACTOR SEMIDIRECT PRODUCT etc..

If a browser doesn't have a particular symbol, the user will see a mark that shows that a character is missing. What they won't see is characters which are semantically different, like "R" instead of RIGHTWARDS ARROW. If the user saves the page as a text file, the maths symbols will still be present and retain their meaning.

For more complicated mathematical expressions, the way to go is MathML. However, since most browsers other than Mozilla can't support this yet, though you may be able to get plug-ins. Nevertheless, anything has to be better than encoding semantic information through font choice.

For example, file/transfer sizes seem to follow what's called a "Heavy-Tailed" distribution (usually modelled as Paretto). This means, roughly, "most of the files are small; most of the bytes are in big files."

The parameters of the distribution depend on where in the network you take the measurements (inside the client, mid-net proxy, server).

• W3C's Web Characterization Activity
• Generating Representative Web Workloads for Network and Server Performance Evaluation - BUCS TR 1997-006 - Crovella and Barford
• Changes in Web Client Access Patterns - BUCS TR 1998-023 - Barford, Bestavros, Bradley, Crovella
• etc etc etc...

There are some old studies of which low-level protocols appear most on the backbone (UDP vs TCP for picking out "streaming" candidates etc); they're harder to get now that the backbones are commercial instead of research-centric.

As for how much is porn and how much is business, well... I've been involved with some studies that have casually looked at that, too; In one trace I checked out, about 13% of requests included some word that would indicate a site with strong sexual content (The 13% number is without trying very hard; it's also worth noting that the percentage of bytes in responses to those requests was a larger percentage, on the order of 20-something IIRC). Unfortunately, it's a little harder to differentiate "business" from "casual/home" with heuristics, so no numbers there.

By the Great Spirit, do we really need another XML grammar?

It's a schema (unfortunately apparently just a DTD). Backgrounder (which is probably unnecessary for you but for others that will misread your message and assume you are implying that there's all these crazy "standards" for XML) : XML is merely the basic rules by which the data is encapsulated, but without agreeing on a standard set of data organization standards (schemas) you really haven't acheived much (and this is something that most XML zealots and detractors fail to understand). If I said "Give me your resume in that new whiz bang `XML format'" I will have achieved nothing and would get a huge mess of sloppy data piles that would have to be analyzed, etc. One might be a binary Word document enclosed in the root tag, while another one might be heirarchial with tonnes of attributes, etc ("object oriented"). If on the other hand I said "Give me your resume conforming to the schema blah blah (giving a namespace like http://www.hr-xml.org/blahblah.xsd) you will know EXACTLY the format that your data should be encapsulated in, that the xsd:timeInstant field is ISO 8601, that the character set can be encapsulated just so, that the character field must follow specific rules, that it must have this set of fields in this order : I can then build a validation engine (that will have a local copy of that schema obviously : I can't see any situation where you'd be working with remote schemas. At most you will view it as a namespace. Schemas once published become like a COM interface : immutable, and when I say that my program conforms to MonkeyShema 1.0 at the namespace location of blah blah then I have that intrinsincally in the logic of the program and noway would I do a get of that schema everytime I wanted to parse something) that says "Does this conform to the rules?" and from there it can parse through it sucking out the values into the HR database. XML + XSD is the standard, and an absolutely brilliant one, that despite the frothy rantings of critics, is incredibly valuable. XML+XSD+XSLT is offering a solution that the industry has never had, certainly not this evolved.

As mentioned though the true power of XML is really in the schemas : The standard way of defining the data (see http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema). When people have such a clearly defined, standard method of describing communications between two products that is of immeasurable value. The idea behind each of these schema standards is to do exactly that : Start agreeing on some basic standard schemas. See Biztalk.org for examples.

Your opposition sounds primarily to be fear of change (which is one of the most imposing software development problems). XML+XPath+XSLT+XSD is quite a load to learn, so firstly I take issue with your claim that XML is "simple" : Can it be simple to start into? Absolutely. Just like C can be easy to start into.

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
&nbsp printf("Hello world!\n\r");
};

Does that diminish the power of C? Not in the slightest. XML represents a great leap forward in our ability to describe the data that we pass back and forth, and the standards are of enormous value.

BTW: Obviously eventually some fully spec'd XML compression will be standardized, such as XMill. XML is heavily compressible : Often, paradoxically, moreso than the same data stored in a proprietary format. However it is usually a moot point because XML usually comes into play where no existing communications were taking place.

Cheers!

Well, at least the standardization part is addressed by the Semantic Web stuff, currently advocated by Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor" of the WWW and current Director of the W3C. An article was posted on Slashdot on April 11 about it that addresses this very issue. A Personal Web Page at the University of Maryland shows off some of the latest advances in this direction.

This is from the Semantic Web Activity Statement. It seems to be a set of technologies aiming to address the service discovery problem more generally than UDDI.

Well, at least the standardization part is addressed by the Semantic Web stuff, currently advocated by Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor" of the WWW and current Director of the W3C. An article was posted on Slashdot on April 11 about it that addresses this very issue. A Personal Web Page at the University of Maryland shows off some of the latest advances in this direction.

This is from the Semantic Web Activity Statement. It seems to be a set of technologies aiming to address the service discovery problem more generally than UDDI.

Well, at least the standardization part is addressed by the Semantic Web stuff, currently advocated by Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor" of the WWW and current Director of the W3C. An article was posted on Slashdot on April 11 about it that addresses this very issue. A Personal Web Page at the University of Maryland shows off some of the latest advances in this direction.

This is from the Semantic Web Activity Statement. It seems to be a set of technologies aiming to address the service discovery problem more generally than UDDI.

Well, at least the standardization part is addressed by the Semantic Web stuff, currently advocated by Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor" of the WWW and current Director of the W3C. An article was posted on Slashdot on April 11 about it that addresses this very issue. A Personal Web Page at the University of Maryland shows off some of the latest advances in this direction.

This is from the Semantic Web Activity Statement. It seems to be a set of technologies aiming to address the service discovery problem more generally than UDDI.

Well, at least the standardization part is addressed by the Semantic Web stuff, currently advocated by Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor" of the WWW and current Director of the W3C. An article was posted on Slashdot on April 11 about it that addresses this very issue. A Personal Web Page at the University of Maryland shows off some of the latest advances in this direction.

This is from the Semantic Web Activity Statement. It seems to be a set of technologies aiming to address the service discovery problem more generally than UDDI.

Well, at least the standardization part is addressed by the Semantic Web stuff, currently advocated by Tim Berners-Lee, the "inventor" of the WWW and current Director of the W3C. An article was posted on Slashdot on April 11 about it that addresses this very issue. A Personal Web Page at the University of Maryland shows off some of the latest advances in this direction.

This is from the Semantic Web Activity Statement. It seems to be a set of technologies aiming to address the service discovery problem more generally than UDDI.

Given that PETA (link) are in favour of hoof & mouth disease, I don't think they can complain too much about the suffering of lamprey larvae.

If I get enough hrefs in my post do I qualify as a karma whore?
--

Maybe I've been reading too much about The Semantic Web and some of the other things going on at M.I.T. with Berners-Lee and Dertouzos, but I believe this disparity between hardware capability and software capability will bring about the mythical "Next Big Thing".

Yes, I'm talking about Star Trek. Maybe not the inter-galactic brouhaha, but definitely the human-computer interaction. We already have decent speech-to-text software; now the folks at M.I.T. and Big Blue (and others) are making advances in speech recognition. It won't be too long before your computer can "understand" what you want it to do, act on it, and give you the results--all with a mere fraction of the effort today's "user-friendly" apps require of you.

I'm making the assumption that there will be enough capital to finance this intensive research. If that fails, then the hardware manufacturers can fall back on their current model, which consists of salespersons telling naive consumers that their pc will run MS Word 50% faster with the new Pentium XX chip...