[WEB4LIB] RE: An interesting article

[arhyno at uwindsor.ca]

>Read more
>http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.asp?p=174156
>
>I would love to hear others' reactions to this -- I'm still mulling it 
>over myself...
>
At least browsers are somewhat well-defined application spaces, and 
matched against each other, Mozilla has shown it can out innovate 
Microsoft. I wonder about the hooks to other desktop applications, for 
example the Amazon/Microsoft announcement from last fall 
<http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/ebusiness/story/0,10801,85822,00.html> 
where the Office suite will "let users add footnotes, bibliography entries 
or book-cover art from Amazon.com into Microsoft documents without having 
to do so manually". In this case, the Research Task Pane, which this was 
planned for, can be used for user-defined systems, but what happens when 
the obnoxiously happy paper clip starts saying things like "I see you are 
working on an essay about Vikings, did you know you could order a book on 
this topic, click here to find out more". 

The battle for browsers may stretch to the center of the content creation 
process, and it is another reason why OpenOffice is such an important 
initiative. The good news is that OpenOffice has very solid and thoughtful 
XML-based underpinnings <see http://xml.openoffice.org/>, and like 
Mozilla, is well-positioned for an XML future.  Microsoft also seems to 
have accepted that XML-related plumbing is the most sensible 
infrastructure for building services into the desktop, so the article's 
warning on the need for standard "web data" is very timely. But the "web" 
part of "web data" may be a lot broader than what is destined for the 
organization's web site, it may also have special meaning for the data 
formats that lie underneath the office suites where much of the world's 
content is created. 

art