[Pythoncard-users] Dave Winer on HyperCard + Web + MORE

[Kevin A. <al...@se...>]

Dave Winer gave PythonCard a mention today:

http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2001/11/21#canOpenSourceCompete

Most of the piece is about open source and not really about PythonCard or
me; I think I'm mostly mentioned because of a point he wants to make about
open source. The opinions are Dave's, not mine, so don't flame me. ;-)

Anyway, I talked to Dave yesterday because I wanted to find out what exactly
he meant when he was talking about HyperCard + the Web + MORE which you can
read about at:

http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2001/11/20#hypercardAndTheWeb

and

http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2001/11/19#hypercardMore

I'm still not entirely sure everything he is putting into Radio Userland or
more importantly how it relates to the PythonCard goals, but he is using
outlines for just about everything: source code (the Frontier debugger is
outline-aware), preferences, template management, etc. and the real work is
done via XML-RPC talking to a server.

Dave's solution space is web apps. If you think of a web application as a
set of slides with the information displayed on templates, then an
application becomes a set of user interface frames, much like the wizard
dialogs a lot of apps use. Many HyperCard stacks could be viewed as slide
shows with the ability to add, edit, and delete slides or search the stack.
This notion could be applied to a desktop app that also works in a browser.
Despite my distaste for the 3270 terminal interface (fill in form, press
Enter, display result) applied to modern GUI apps, Dave might be onto
something, so I'm going to at least pay attention.

In case I completely missed the point of what Dave was trying to get across
yesterday and to give him a chance to correct me or follow-up I've cc'ed him
on this message

ka