Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

Anil Dash talks about Stories and Tools, drawing comparisons between the Web as a text medium and the Web as application platform. I think he oversimplifies the argument a bit, stating that awkward browser-based Web applications are the result of trying to “make a story act like a tool.” He points out why Oddpost is both good (wicked-cool functionality) and bad (the HTML is meaningless outside a narrow context), puzzles over the lack of a “web tool DTD,” and skims over AppML before finally settling on DomAPI as his widget toolset of choice, even though the HTML created by any DomAPI widget is just as semantically meaningless as anything served up by Oddpost.

I sense there’s an implied conclusion here. Back up to AppML (Application Markup Language, not a W3C standard) and think about how much more meaningful it is as opposed to the mess of HTML and JavaScript created by DomAPI, DynAPI or DOMLib. Now think XSLT. You get the idea. Now it’s just a matter of when this convergence will happen.

By the way, more than one Australian wrote in to say that the author of that “take a month off” article was high on crack.