My question is this: How will people get paid to make songs, TV shows and movies?
In the 1940s I couldn't have predicted the business models that became viable in the 1950s. Do you really think that if modern technology had existed then the television business would never have been invented? I tend to disagree. I think that the business was built by particular technology and will adapt to whatever technologies come along. I could list a variety of different strategies, including:
Pay-to-watch: you have all of the data on your hard drive but you need a decryption key from a remote service.
Street-performer's protocol.
Delayed release: live broadcasts cost money...delayed ones don't. Watching live broadcasts becomes a social event.
Television shows become promos for movies shown in fancy movie houses at $20.00 a pop.
Product placements.
Comedians (e.g. Seinfeld, Romano) make television shows as promos for their tours -- and pay the cast out of their tour profits.
Taxes
Bandwidth levies
Tips
I'm not arguing for or against any one of those. I'm making the point that there are a variety of options probably including some that haven't been thought of yet. Have faith in capitalism and ingenuity. We live in a very frightening world if the production of art and entertainment depends upon the largess of jackbooted Senator thugs and a vigilant police force.
Your post is very short-sighted. First, you talk about ripping to lossless, easy-to-decode formats as if that's a silly thing to do. Hell, if the disk space is cheap enough why not take some load off your CPU and use the disk.
Second, you talk about a hundred DVDs as if that is a lot. But if you wanted to record all of the television that you watch over the course of a year so you can go back and relive that year's TV in the future, it would take more than 100DVDs worth of space. More to the point, we are moving to a time where we will all just have all of the songs, TV shows and movies of all time on all of our local hard drives. It makes no sense (technically, economics may disagree) to depend on a remote server hundreds of miles away when you could have a local cache of _everything_. I expect some will use their 120TB drives to ensure that every piece of data that crosses my Ethernet cable is cached on the local side so I have my own Internet WayBack machine.
And then there are the games. Games of the future will probably feature massive amounts of real-time video and incredibly detailed 3D models. The Sims Online is a primitive preview (and takes more than a GB of disk space).
We will find ways to use more and more disk space. 120TB will seem constraining at some point. Of cours we'll need either higher bandwidth or bigger disks to DISTRIBUTE the data that will fill those drives!
VB is a good tool. It is a great environment. But it is a terrible, terrible programming language. Slashdotters flame VB because it offends us that such a horrible language could rise to widespread popularity because it happens to be wrapped in a very productive GUI development environment.
Point still stands. The poster didn't say that the people currently running the business would more offshore, just that the business would. And it would, the marginal profits would still be there for people outside the US to take advantage of.
If the US law is emulated in other developed countries then the businesses can only be run from under-developed countries. This is much more difficult and expensive for a variety of reasons (e.g. bandwidth, distribution,...) so I would expect volume to drop.
The spammers who are U.S.-based would merely move offshore.
It isn't the person pulling the trigger on the spam that matters. It is the business sponsoring it. For most of these marginally profitable businesses, (penis extenders?) it would be easier to do something else rather than move offshore. Plus, the money has to get from US consumers to the people offshore. There may be legislative ways to make this difficult.
The parent basically said this: 'the content is worthless unless delivered in a format valuable to me'. I think that sums up the whole argument very well.
If the content had _no value_ to the poster, then he wouldn't waste his time reading it. But it does. Therefore it has some value. There is currently no payment scheme that meets the various criteria that would allow him to pay at the appropriate value and perhaps there will never be one. But it doesn't make sense to say that there is "no value." Ignore the whole issue of micropayments. Imagine if he said: "I eat salad because I live with my parents, but it has no value to me so I wouldn't pay for it." That's fine if you presume a particular price for salad. But it makes no sense if someone offers him salad for $0.10 or $0.01 or all the salad you an eat for a lifetime for $0.50. If salad was THAT valueless to him, then he would not waste his time eating it today. Now he may never find a salad at the right price and with the appropriate convenience and with the appropriate confidence in its quality and safety. But it is illogical (from an economic point of view) to say that he would never pay for salad under any circumstance, no matter how cheap, easy and safe it was...and yet he eats it every day. Or to be concrete, if there were a way of paying a cent a week for Google, or going without Google, does it really make sense to you that most people who would choose to go without? That's exactly what the original poster said and it still doesn't make any sense to me.
I'm _not_ predicting that Google will ever go pay-to-play. I am saying that the reason the poster suggested ("Google has no monetary value") was bunk. Google has monetary value but there is no convenient way to charge for/pay for it and there may never be.
You're quibbling over the definition of "micropayment"
No I'm not. Did your read my post? I'm arguing that the statement: "Web content is not worth paying for" makes no economic sense. It makes sense to say that Web content is not worth paying for at some particular price point, or that it is too inconvenient to pay for, or that there are security, trust or logistics issues. But he didn't say that. He said "the content is not worth paying for" which is totally illogical. The print NYT is worth $1.00 but the online one is not worth even $0.000000001? That doesn't make any sense unless you view the NYT as being primarily about paper, not about content.
The problem is that for the average person, the vast majority of what's on the web isn't worth paying for. It doesn't matter how easy it is to pay for, or how reasonable the cost is. There's just no demand for it.
I find that an illogical position. There is hardly anything that is "not worth paying for" in a pure sense. As Jacob Neilson points out, you "pay" for an article on CNN with your time. It is only "free" if you value your tie at $0.00. Most people do not. And then you are also paying with bandwidth. If it was truly the fact that Web content was valueless, nobody would use the Web. But they do. Therefore there is some financial price that is small enough to be lost in the noise of the other costs. e.g. Who would complain if after a month of normal surfing they had an extra $1.00 tacked on to their bill but had never seen a banner ad during that period? A buck for a month without banners and popups on all of my favorite sites? I'd probably opt-in for that!
But the problem has always been: "How do we exact that extremely low cost with an equally small hassle to the user and yet give the user the sense that they are in control?" And there is the associated problem that the Web is a massively decentralized system so there are huge technical deployment issues.
If Site X was the only source of entertainment in my life, I'd surely pay a fair (maybe even unfair) price for it, but I have to ask myself -- would I rather get a book, a CD, rent a movie, spend a weekend at the beach, buy a camcorder, buy dinner, fix the car, etc., instead of subscribing to (or buying individual page views from) a website? In a word, no.
It isn't a question of "website subscription" versus "buy a CD". That presumes that the prices are equal. The appropriate question is whether a hundred website pages are worth a print magazin. Or a thousand. Or ten thousand. Or a million. Or a billion. If the answer is really that a billion web page views are not worth the price of a print magazine to you then I don't know why you waste your time on the web at all.
It's not just me, either, to judge from the state of the web content business. For the vast majority of people, the main value of the web lies in the fact that the content is free and convenient. Take that away, and very few people will be willing to pay for anything at all, and very few of them will do more than they do with the paper equivalent -- maybe subscribe to a newspaper, and maybe a couple of magazines.
The whole point of micropayments is that you don't think of it as being like a subscription to a newspaper or a couple of magazines.
In summary, despite what you say, the question of pay-to-play content on the Web _does_ come back to "how cheap", "how easy" and "how much do I trust the process." If a micropayment scheme could answer those three questions right (a big _if_) then yes, it _would_ be viable in competition with other media. It's basic economics that even if the Web is not as entertaining as other media (another big "if"), it can win if it is sufficiently cheaper and easier. You haven't explained why you think the laws of economics do not apply in this case.
If people are making billion dollar investments based on "Moore's law" and "Moore's law", don't you think it is a problem if "Moore's law" is a fluffy thing that shifts around every decade and has no single coherent definition? If nobody understand what it is or why it works or what might prevent it from working in the future?
I think that the article makes the point that the death of Moore's law _as Moore stated it_ is inevitable:
"Moore noted that the complexity of minimum cost semiconductor components had doubled per year since the first prototype microchip was produced in 1959. This exponential increase in the number of components on a chip became later known as Moore's Law. In the 1980s, Moore's Law started to be described as the doubling of number of transistors on a chip every 18 months. At the beginning of the 1990s, Moore's Law became commonly interpreted as the doubling of microprocessor power every 18 months. In the 1990s, Moore's Law became widely associated with the claim that computing power at fixed cost is doubling every 18 months."
Once we reach quantum boundaries, the first statement of Moore's law will fail. There may be something like Moore's law in the future, but it will be just another restatement:
""Speculations on the extended lifetime of Moore's Law are therefore often centered on quantum computing, bio-computing, DNA computers, and other theoretically possible information processing mechanisms. Such extensions, obviously, extend beyond semiconductor industry and the domain of Moore's Law. Indeed, it could be difficult to define a "component" or a "chip" in those future devices.""
Back when Henry Ford was starting to build cars, one of the famous things he did was to yes, work his workers hard, but he also gave them wages far above what was normal for the day and age. This was to help prime the pump of demand for his product. If you had a country of poor people, then no-one could really buy your expensive product, and you would never have a mass market. Thus it was in his long term interest to pay his workers well.
That doesn't really make much sense. If Ford Motor Company was a massive company it still would not employ more than 5% of the population. If those were the only people who could afford cars his business would fail. Furthermore, if Ford he had competitors that made cars a little cheaper, Ford wouldn't even monopolize that 5% of the market. It would make more sense to payhis employees exactly what they asked for and drop his car prices so that many people could afford to buy the cars.
After the software is released, you have the code. You aren't locked into anythign at all. You can hire contractors to add features or some competitor could fork it and do a lower ransom. Even today, you can't guarantee that anyone will continue to release new revisions of any particular open source software product.
So what is so much better to an XML parser, as compared to dozens and dozens of other parsers & lexical analyzers (such as yacc+lex, javaCC etc)?!?
Let's say somebody specifies a language. Now you have to implement a parser. But someone has already implemented the XML parser. You don't have to do it. If someone hands you a spec for a language (let's say a recursive curly-braces-based language), you can't just hand that specification to yacc+lex. You rewrite it into the format expected for input for yacc+lex and then someone else rewrites it for JavaCC and then someone else rewrites it for ANTLR, and then some Perl parser generator and then some Python parser generator and then JavaScript -- what the hell do you do about parsing the language in Javascript? Hand-rolled recursive descent?
And don't forget that every one of these tools will have a different set of constraints on the input language. Left-recursive, right-recursive, etc. etc. You need to know the idiosyncracies of your particular tool: better grab the Dragon book!
Non-XML syntaxes have their places. I'm glad that Python isn't an XML syntax. But it is insane in this day and age to say that office file formats should be either binary or non-XML. XML was invented for office documents and using it for them is a no-brainer.
Yes, that is a very succinct and accurate representation of the situation with XML and binary data. The only other issue is that there is constantly the idea floating around of a standard packaging mechanism like JAR for Java (which is basically just a zipfile, but at least standardized and recoganizable). But those discussions seem to seldom come to anything much.
Ok, so you can view the resulting document in any web browser. So what?
So a lot of people like to look at their documents (and other people's documents) in web browsers and browser-integrated mail programs. You get that almost for free by building on the open XML standard instead of binary crap.
I'm supposed to open a table of numbers in my web browser and then copy/paste them into my spreadsheet before I can do anything useful with them?
No, but that's a possible workflow for those with older spreadsheets.
The point was that the office application needs to know what to do with each tag. Since it has to have code to deal with each tag, it could just as easily have code to deal with each field in a binary file.
You are totally wrong. It is not "just as easy" to write a parser as to deal with the output of a SAX event stream or DOM tree. Tens of thousands of developers will attest to that fact.
As for xslt, are you suggesting that the xslt should parse the xml tags to output a binary file that is then parsed by the application? How is this faster than either of the others?
No, standard XSLT cannot output binary data. But it can output a variety of other file formats, like HTML, XSL-FO, Docbook, TeX and RTF. But it only works with XML input.
Why would my compiled binary office application need a binary plugin to read a binary file?
Documents move between different applications. They have a complicated workflow. Your office application is only one tool that needs to work with the data. Your browser is another. Your company's XML-aware document database is another. The company's protal is another. Oracle is another. Google is another. Microsoft recognizes this, that's the stated reason that Office 11 will support XML deeply. I really don't know why I'm bothering to argue with you, because everybody with a stake in the office tools business understands that XML-based file formats are the future...even Microsoft.
Frankly, all XML really does is explode a file's size by encapsulating data with tags. Whoop de doo. You have to have a rigorous and complete document specification, and while a DTD may fulfill that need it doesn't always. With a rigorous and complete spec though then XML is redundant - you can just as easily parse a binary file at that point.
That's just false. With a rigorous and complete specification for a language you still have to write a parser for that language. But with XML, you use one of the dozen off-the-shelf parsers, including the one that probably ships with your operating system or browser. Guess what, these office documents will probably work _out of the box_ with pre-existing XML browsers (Mozilla, IE 6) and CSS stylesheets. Or at worse, an XSLT could do the transformation on either the client or server side. The virtue of standards is that you can leverage standard tools.
A binary file format would typically need a binary plugin.
Why would anyone logically think that they would embrace a standard that will put their competitors on an equal playing field?
The standard will not put competitors on an equal playing field. It will be based on existing OpenOffice file formats. Therefore it will give competitors a lead.
* Lack of features -- there's a reason people are still using.doc and.pdf instead of HTML, and giving HTML a fancier name for the new millenium isn't going to change it. Anything tougher than bold, italics, and tables has been proven to be an O(n^2) representation in HTML and has been neglected because nobody wants to download a meg of webpage.
That's the most clueless paragraph I've read on slashdot today, and that's quite an accomplishment! O(n^2) representation in HTML? ROTFLMAO!
Ignore all of the obvious issues about the value of the.DOC monopoly. Consider instead that the name of the working group is the same as the name of a product that competes with yours and that the working group has pretty much decided that the file format will be based upon the file format of that competitor.
In other words, Microsoft would be participating in the canonization of the file format of not only a competing product but an open source competing product. Can you really blame them from seeing that as a no-win situation?
I wish the standardizers and coders the best of luck and I would love to see them succeed. But I'm sure none of them are naive enough to have expected Microsoft to participate. Only the scandal-hungry hounds at CNet and Slashdot consider this news.
By the same token SVG works in concert with HTML, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to say that SVG therefore is looking to replace Adobe Acrobat (though the complete solution may very well).
You are incorrect. There is a working group for SVG-in-print that is looking at SVG fulfilling tasks that overlap heavily with PDF.
SVG is a vector graphic addition to the standards compilation, basically, and while using it in concert with other standards allows for a Flash "like" solution, SVG fills a vector graphic gap in the web technology grab bag.
Fine. The point is that the emerging stack could add up to a competitor to Flash so that Flash would be replaced as various hypertext formats were replaced by HTML and its associated standards.
Slashdot Mirror
My question is this: How will people get paid to make songs, TV shows and movies?
In the 1940s I couldn't have predicted the business models that became viable in the 1950s. Do you really think that if modern technology had existed then the television business would never have been invented? I tend to disagree. I think that the business was built by particular technology and will adapt to whatever technologies come along. I could list a variety of different strategies, including:
I'm not arguing for or against any one of those. I'm making the point that there are a variety of options probably including some that haven't been thought of yet. Have faith in capitalism and ingenuity. We live in a very frightening world if the production of art and entertainment depends upon the largess of jackbooted Senator thugs and a vigilant police force.
Your post is very short-sighted. First, you talk about ripping to lossless, easy-to-decode formats as if that's a silly thing to do. Hell, if the disk space is cheap enough why not take some load off your CPU and use the disk.
Second, you talk about a hundred DVDs as if that is a lot. But if you wanted to record all of the television that you watch over the course of a year so you can go back and relive that year's TV in the future, it would take more than 100DVDs worth of space. More to the point, we are moving to a time where we will all just have all of the songs, TV shows and movies of all time on all of our local hard drives. It makes no sense (technically, economics may disagree) to depend on a remote server hundreds of miles away when you could have a local cache of _everything_. I expect some will use their 120TB drives to ensure that every piece of data that crosses my Ethernet cable is cached on the local side so I have my own Internet WayBack machine.
And then there are the games. Games of the future will probably feature massive amounts of real-time video and incredibly detailed 3D models. The Sims Online is a primitive preview (and takes more than a GB of disk space).
We will find ways to use more and more disk space. 120TB will seem constraining at some point. Of cours we'll need either higher bandwidth or bigger disks to DISTRIBUTE the data that will fill those drives!
This is RAND licensing, folks. The same fine mess the W3C wants to get into.
Oh really?
VB is a good tool. It is a great environment. But it is a terrible, terrible programming language. Slashdotters flame VB because it offends us that such a horrible language could rise to widespread popularity because it happens to be wrapped in a very productive GUI development environment.
Point still stands. The poster didn't say that the people currently running the business would more offshore, just that the business would. And it would, the marginal profits would still be there for people outside the US to take advantage of.
If the US law is emulated in other developed countries then the businesses can only be run from under-developed countries. This is much more difficult and expensive for a variety of reasons (e.g. bandwidth, distribution, ...) so I would expect volume to drop.
The spammers who are U.S.-based would merely move offshore.
It isn't the person pulling the trigger on the spam that matters. It is the business sponsoring it. For most of these marginally profitable businesses, (penis extenders?) it would be easier to do something else rather than move offshore. Plus, the money has to get from US consumers to the people offshore. There may be legislative ways to make this difficult.
He should resign because he disagrees with you? So much for academic freedom!
The parent basically said this: 'the content is worthless unless delivered in a format valuable to me'. I think that sums up the whole argument very well.
If the content had _no value_ to the poster, then he wouldn't waste his time reading it. But it does. Therefore it has some value. There is currently no payment scheme that meets the various criteria that would allow him to pay at the appropriate value and perhaps there will never be one. But it doesn't make sense to say that there is "no value." Ignore the whole issue of micropayments. Imagine if he said: "I eat salad because I live with my parents, but it has no value to me so I wouldn't pay for it." That's fine if you presume a particular price for salad. But it makes no sense if someone offers him salad for $0.10 or $0.01 or all the salad you an eat for a lifetime for $0.50. If salad was THAT valueless to him, then he would not waste his time eating it today. Now he may never find a salad at the right price and with the appropriate convenience and with the appropriate confidence in its quality and safety. But it is illogical (from an economic point of view) to say that he would never pay for salad under any circumstance, no matter how cheap, easy and safe it was...and yet he eats it every day. Or to be concrete, if there were a way of paying a cent a week for Google, or going without Google, does it really make sense to you that most people who would choose to go without? That's exactly what the original poster said and it still doesn't make any sense to me.
I'm _not_ predicting that Google will ever go pay-to-play. I am saying that the reason the poster suggested ("Google has no monetary value") was bunk. Google has monetary value but there is no convenient way to charge for/pay for it and there may never be.
You're quibbling over the definition of "micropayment"
No I'm not. Did your read my post? I'm arguing that the statement: "Web content is not worth paying for" makes no economic sense. It makes sense to say that Web content is not worth paying for at some particular price point, or that it is too inconvenient to pay for, or that there are security, trust or logistics issues. But he didn't say that. He said "the content is not worth paying for" which is totally illogical. The print NYT is worth $1.00 but the online one is not worth even $0.000000001? That doesn't make any sense unless you view the NYT as being primarily about paper, not about content.
The problem is that for the average person, the vast majority of what's on the web isn't worth paying for. It doesn't matter how easy it is to pay for, or how reasonable the cost is. There's just no demand for it.
I find that an illogical position. There is hardly anything that is "not worth paying for" in a pure sense. As Jacob Neilson points out, you "pay" for an article on CNN with your time. It is only "free" if you value your tie at $0.00. Most people do not. And then you are also paying with bandwidth. If it was truly the fact that Web content was valueless, nobody would use the Web. But they do. Therefore there is some financial price that is small enough to be lost in the noise of the other costs. e.g. Who would complain if after a month of normal surfing they had an extra $1.00 tacked on to their bill but had never seen a banner ad during that period? A buck for a month without banners and popups on all of my favorite sites? I'd probably opt-in for that!
But the problem has always been: "How do we exact that extremely low cost with an equally small hassle to the user and yet give the user the sense that they are in control?" And there is the associated problem that the Web is a massively decentralized system so there are huge technical deployment issues.
If Site X was the only source of entertainment in my life, I'd surely pay a fair (maybe even unfair) price for it, but I have to ask myself -- would I rather get a book, a CD, rent a movie, spend a weekend at the beach, buy a camcorder, buy dinner, fix the car, etc., instead of subscribing to (or buying individual page views from) a website? In a word, no.
It isn't a question of "website subscription" versus "buy a CD". That presumes that the prices are equal. The appropriate question is whether a hundred website pages are worth a print magazin. Or a thousand. Or ten thousand. Or a million. Or a billion. If the answer is really that a billion web page views are not worth the price of a print magazine to you then I don't know why you waste your time on the web at all.
It's not just me, either, to judge from the state of the web content business. For the vast majority of people, the main value of the web lies in the fact that the content is free and convenient. Take that away, and very few people will be willing to pay for anything at all, and very few of them will do more than they do with the paper equivalent -- maybe subscribe to a newspaper, and maybe a couple of magazines.
The whole point of micropayments is that you don't think of it as being like a subscription to a newspaper or a couple of magazines.
In summary, despite what you say, the question of pay-to-play content on the Web _does_ come back to "how cheap", "how easy" and "how much do I trust the process." If a micropayment scheme could answer those three questions right (a big _if_) then yes, it _would_ be viable in competition with other media. It's basic economics that even if the Web is not as entertaining as other media (another big "if"), it can win if it is sufficiently cheaper and easier. You haven't explained why you think the laws of economics do not apply in this case.
If people are making billion dollar investments based on "Moore's law" and "Moore's law", don't you think it is a problem if "Moore's law" is a fluffy thing that shifts around every decade and has no single coherent definition? If nobody understand what it is or why it works or what might prevent it from working in the future?
I think that the article makes the point that the death of Moore's law _as Moore stated it_ is inevitable:
"Moore noted that the complexity of minimum cost semiconductor components had doubled per year since the first prototype microchip was produced in 1959. This exponential increase in the number of components on a chip became later known as Moore's Law. In the 1980s, Moore's Law started to be described as the doubling of number of transistors on a chip every 18 months. At the beginning of the 1990s, Moore's Law became commonly interpreted as the doubling of microprocessor power every 18 months. In the 1990s, Moore's Law became widely associated with the claim that computing power at fixed cost is doubling every 18 months."
Once we reach quantum boundaries, the first statement of Moore's law will fail. There may be something like Moore's law in the future, but it will be just another restatement:
""Speculations on the extended lifetime of Moore's Law are therefore often centered on quantum computing, bio-computing, DNA computers, and other theoretically possible information processing mechanisms. Such extensions, obviously, extend beyond semiconductor industry and the domain of Moore's Law. Indeed, it could be difficult to define a "component" or a "chip" in those future devices.""
Back when Henry Ford was starting to build cars, one of the famous things he did was to yes, work his workers hard, but he also gave them wages far above what was normal for the day and age. This was to help prime the pump of demand for his product. If you had a country of poor people, then no-one could really buy your expensive product, and you would never have a mass market. Thus it was in his long term interest to pay his workers well.
That doesn't really make much sense. If Ford Motor Company was a massive company it still would not employ more than 5% of the population. If those were the only people who could afford cars his business would fail. Furthermore, if Ford he had competitors that made cars a little cheaper, Ford wouldn't even monopolize that 5% of the market. It would make more sense to payhis employees exactly what they asked for and drop his car prices so that many people could afford to buy the cars.
After the software is released, you have the code. You aren't locked into anythign at all. You can hire contractors to add features or some competitor could fork it and do a lower ransom. Even today, you can't guarantee that anyone will continue to release new revisions of any particular open source software product.
Yes.. it makes parsing easier. But that's ALL it does. An XML file can still contain proprietary data, and only MS would know what to do with it.
Ummm. We're talking about the Open Office project's XML, aren't we?
So what is so much better to an XML parser, as compared to dozens and dozens of other parsers & lexical analyzers (such as yacc+lex, javaCC etc)?!?
Let's say somebody specifies a language. Now you have to implement a parser. But someone has already implemented the XML parser. You don't have to do it. If someone hands you a spec for a language (let's say a recursive curly-braces-based language), you can't just hand that specification to yacc+lex. You rewrite it into the format expected for input for yacc+lex and then someone else rewrites it for JavaCC and then someone else rewrites it for ANTLR, and then some Perl parser generator and then some Python parser generator and then JavaScript -- what the hell do you do about parsing the language in Javascript? Hand-rolled recursive descent?
And don't forget that every one of these tools will have a different set of constraints on the input language. Left-recursive, right-recursive, etc. etc. You need to know the idiosyncracies of your particular tool: better grab the Dragon book!
Non-XML syntaxes have their places. I'm glad that Python isn't an XML syntax. But it is insane in this day and age to say that office file formats should be either binary or non-XML. XML was invented for office documents and using it for them is a no-brainer.
Yes, that is a very succinct and accurate representation of the situation with XML and binary data. The only other issue is that there is constantly the idea floating around of a standard packaging mechanism like JAR for Java (which is basically just a zipfile, but at least standardized and recoganizable). But those discussions seem to seldom come to anything much.
Ok, so you can view the resulting document in any web browser. So what?
So a lot of people like to look at their documents (and other people's documents) in web browsers and browser-integrated mail programs. You get that almost for free by building on the open XML standard instead of binary crap.
I'm supposed to open a table of numbers in my web browser and then copy/paste them into my spreadsheet before I can do anything useful with them?
No, but that's a possible workflow for those with older spreadsheets.
The point was that the office application needs to know what to do with each tag. Since it has to have code to deal with each tag, it could just as easily have code to deal with each field in a binary file.
You are totally wrong. It is not "just as easy" to write a parser as to deal with the output of a SAX event stream or DOM tree. Tens of thousands of developers will attest to that fact.
As for xslt, are you suggesting that the xslt should parse the xml tags to output a binary file that is then parsed by the application? How is this faster than either of the others?
No, standard XSLT cannot output binary data. But it can output a variety of other file formats, like HTML, XSL-FO, Docbook, TeX and RTF. But it only works with XML input.
Why would my compiled binary office application need a binary plugin to read a binary file?
Documents move between different applications. They have a complicated workflow. Your office application is only one tool that needs to work with the data. Your browser is another. Your company's XML-aware document database is another. The company's protal is another. Oracle is another. Google is another. Microsoft recognizes this, that's the stated reason that Office 11 will support XML deeply. I really don't know why I'm bothering to argue with you, because everybody with a stake in the office tools business understands that XML-based file formats are the future...even Microsoft.
Frankly, all XML really does is explode a file's size by encapsulating data with tags. Whoop de doo. You have to have a rigorous and complete document specification, and while a DTD may fulfill that need it doesn't always. With a rigorous and complete spec though then XML is redundant - you can just as easily parse a binary file at that point.
That's just false. With a rigorous and complete specification for a language you still have to write a parser for that language. But with XML, you use one of the dozen off-the-shelf parsers, including the one that probably ships with your operating system or browser. Guess what, these office documents will probably work _out of the box_ with pre-existing XML browsers (Mozilla, IE 6) and CSS stylesheets. Or at worse, an XSLT could do the transformation on either the client or server side. The virtue of standards is that you can leverage standard tools.
A binary file format would typically need a binary plugin.
Why would anyone logically think that they would embrace a standard that will put their competitors on an equal playing field?
The standard will not put competitors on an equal playing field. It will be based on existing OpenOffice file formats. Therefore it will give competitors a lead.
* Lack of features -- there's a reason people are still using .doc and .pdf instead of HTML, and giving HTML a fancier name for the new millenium isn't going to change it. Anything tougher than bold, italics, and tables has been proven to be an O(n^2) representation in HTML and has been neglected because nobody wants to download a meg of webpage.
That's the most clueless paragraph I've read on slashdot today, and that's quite an accomplishment! O(n^2) representation in HTML? ROTFLMAO!
Ignore all of the obvious issues about the value of the .DOC monopoly. Consider instead that the name of the working group is the same as the name of a product that competes with yours and that the working group has pretty much decided that the file format will be based upon the file format of that competitor.
In other words, Microsoft would be participating in the canonization of the file format of not only a competing product but an open source competing product. Can you really blame them from seeing that as a no-win situation?
I wish the standardizers and coders the best of luck and I would love to see them succeed. But I'm sure none of them are naive enough to have expected Microsoft to participate. Only the scandal-hungry hounds at CNet and Slashdot consider this news.
XForms is a candidate recommendation. It must still go through the proposed and final recommendation phases before it is "accepted" by the W3C.
I'll finish this discussion with a URL. It looks alot like the kind of thing most people do in flash.
http://www.melmcgee.com/cgi-bin/texis/index?conteBy the same token SVG works in concert with HTML, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to say that SVG therefore is looking to replace Adobe Acrobat (though the complete solution may very well).
You are incorrect. There is a working group for SVG-in-print that is looking at SVG fulfilling tasks that overlap heavily with PDF.
SVG is a vector graphic addition to the standards compilation, basically, and while using it in concert with other standards allows for a Flash "like" solution, SVG fills a vector graphic gap in the web technology grab bag.
Fine. The point is that the emerging stack could add up to a competitor to Flash so that Flash would be replaced as various hypertext formats were replaced by HTML and its associated standards.