Back in January of 1993, Marc Andreessen and his team released the Mosaic web browser. It captured my imagination for several reasons. First, it brought the promise of a platform independent means for sharing information across the internet. It was not only a hypertext system but a hypermedia system.
At that point, the network barely had enough bandwidth to support the transmission of photographs, much less video. But Mosaic didn’t restrict the type or size of content. It was built to allow the browser to be extended to support new media types and protocols as the were developed. That was the inspiration for the name of the program. It was a Mosaic of protocol engines and renderers.
The second feature that captured my imagination was the description of the input mechanisms provided by that early version of HTML. I reasoned that if this browser could be evolved to allow arbitrary input as well as rendering new kinds of output as they were developed, then it was for all intents and purposes a platform independent, Graphical User Interface (GUI).
This came at a time when users were arguing over which operating system would dominate the world of desktop workstations. There were three major contenders. First, there was the Macintosh. Then the PC running Windows. Bringing up the rear was unix and linux both running the Xwindows system.
Here, presenting itself in the guise of an humble hypertext reader, was a potential answer to the tower of Babel situation that we found ourselves in. Realizing that vision has taken the better part of ten or fifteen years.
The technologies that made this possible are Cascading Style Sheets, Javascript, HTML5, the Apache web server, and Node.js. These are not the only technologies that contributed to this web application platform, but they are the most significant ones.
At this point we have the means to make web development easy and platform independent but lack the resolve to implement a web development tool that runs on the cloud and is simple enough to use that mere mortals (and managers) can use it to maintain their information on the web.
There is actually several packages that come close to providing the cloud centric development that I am talking about. The one that has captured my imagination is called XWiki. It allows you to create content interactively by using the same kind of tools that you do to browse a web site.
The place where XWiki falls short at present, is in its lack of an obvious way to import a complex brand identity framework and use it as a template upon which to implement the actual content of the site. It should be possible to import the content from other programs or files, as well as dynamically creating it in the framework.
I’m sure such frameworks exist. They’re just not open source or as simple to use as I would want them to be. I’m still intrigued by XWiki but it has fallen back in my estimation of it’s ability to be easily extended to support the kind of web site development that I’m trying to foster.
I haven’t really talked much about my vision for this tool. That may be because I am still fleshing it out in my mind. I will give it some thought, take some notes, and make another stab at specifying the tool that I’m dancing around tomorrow.
Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.