In the workshop on Virtual Environments and WWW at the recent Web conference
in Paris this was one of the things that several groups picked up
on -- browsers and such like are become huge, one-application-fits-all
type things, but from the point of view of a designer/user creating
a new tool, what we need is a more lightweight, component-oriented approach
which allows us to put together new applications quickly.
Interestingly, NCSA had a BOF session later in the week in which
they announced that they intend to break up Mosaic into smaller
functional units (HTML parser, HTTP component etc.) so that it
can be used in this kind of way. They also described their new
Habanero toolkit, which allows you to convert a Java applet into
a collaborative Java application with little overhead.
See http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Habanero/ for more info.
I guess the Paris workshop should report back pretty soon (but everyone
seems to have gone into hiding since it finished!)... Jeni, are
you out there? :)
Chris
-- Chris Hand, Senior Lecturer | Dept of Computer Science, e-mail: cph@dmu.ac.uk | De Montfort University, The Gateway WWW: http://www.cms.dmu.ac.uk/~cph/ | LEICESTER, UK LE1 9BH