21:34, Thursday 22 Jun., 2000 Link

I was going to post a response to Dave Winer's Microsoft.NET notes, but I need to work on it some more. The rest of this post is what I thought of writing, starting with a quote from dw's post:

Hey it wasn't really Microsoft's vision, it was *our* vision. I think they've not really figured it out.

Right on! Supporting evidence from MSNBC's coverage of .NET:

"There has been an explosion of new devices and an explosion of Web sites and Web services, but no one is taking a step back and looking it at a higher level," said Microsoft spokesman Greg Shaw.

That's so unfair. W3C? Mozilla? I'm excited about what Microsoft are doing, but I'm concerned they may be going about it in the wrong way. Over a decade ago, Apple released Hypercard as a monolithic app and claimed they had perfected the Memex. It was very popular for a time, but now a collection of open tools and protocols (www, http, http post, cgi, xmlrpc, soap) do the same job and do it better. If only the vast talent in Microsoft could turn to using already existing|developing standards (XPointer, XPath, XLink, XSLT). XML is the new ASCII, afterall -- of course it's going to be supported; but what about the semantics? Watching what's happening, it's almost as if Microsoft never learnt to abstract properly.

And at that point, I run out of things to say. But do you get the idea?