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Sender: "Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>
From: Al Christians <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 11:11:15 -0800
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Reply-To: Al Christians <[log in to unmask]>
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"Kester, Rush W." wrote:
>
> I have learned from painful experiences, (e.g., infinite
> pop-up windows thanks to JavaScript amatures, unsolicited
> emails thanks to "cookies" and integrated email address
> information, system hangs & crashes thanks to MicroSoft's
> and Sun's Java wars) to disable some features when visiting
> new sites even with "state of the art" browsers like IE5 and
> Netscape 4.75.
>

A website could create a good impression on a fairly large
audience by simply failing to work but doing so reasonably,
ie with a good explanation of why it didn't work for the
visitor's particular browser and settings.  (Rant about
big name brain-dead websites omitted, you're welcome)  Too
many simply crash or even lock up my browser (Netscape 4.79)

For an example mentioned previously in this thread, the
'ubiquitous' Adobe plug-in fails to work on about 1% of
computers, including mine, and the exact cause is not known
as far as I can tell.  The story on the Adobe newsgroup is
that cleaning out my system and reinstalling Windows and
then all my other software into a clean fresh registry will
likely fix it,  but I don't want to do that.  I can download
and view off-line Adobe content, but it only opens correctly
in my browser about one time in 20.

A truly friendly design for a website intended to promote
newer web technologies might work with a main page in pure
HTML.  From there, links could invoke those fancier features
with which the visitor wanted to experiment.  An explanation
of the particular prerequisites and how to meet them would be
available for each of the links using non-universal features.
For those who don't meet the prerequisites and don't want to
install software just to see what happens, screenshots and
descriptions of the technology would also be available.

I've been working with the AWS and the Ada MSXML interface
that comes with GNATCOM.  These are working fine for me, but
I don't see yet how Ada has such a big lead in XML, web
servers, web services, or whatever.  My Ada software to
connect AWS and MSXML is not too different from what would
happen if I was trying to create the same features in Java
(or even VB AFAIK).   These things are now the big thing, and
even if Ada has a lead, it will not be easy to hold.  What's
the competitive advantage for Ada when there are so many
off-the-shelf components for other languages that support
XML and SOAP?


Al

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