Was Joel around for OpenDoc and OLE?
People have been trying to make plug 'n play software components for a lonnnng time.
Good luck!
Conversation
same, old is new again. Next is in place activation, monikers
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What do you think went wrong that held the OpenDoc vision back?
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I'm not familiar with it but my guess is that Windows at that time had the market dominance over Apple and prevent it to gain popularity. I think Sun also had initiative. OLE was really easy to implement (on Windows) and got a lot of early support from vendors
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reading the wikipedia page, it seems that Apple also messed thing up a lot, lack of leadership, trying to merge unrelated projects. It was not a good period for them. The Sun thing was CORBA, also a big mess (this one I tried). Then OMG. Tried too.
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the core of the problem was the opendoc was made in reaction of OLE and not based on an original idea. Lack of vision more than a vision in fact.
Block seems to represent an existing need and an opportunity but the proposal lack a general perspective yet is already very complex
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there are assumptions on what links & entities are, what could components do which is very limited. Works fine for a few examples (embed, pictures calendar) but will not allows new types of apps to strive. Especially those who interact w/ each others or w/ other of their blocks
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Ah, so it would struggle with use cases aimed at forming a semantic web?
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possibly, There are some typeId like in kneaver but I don't know the use of them. I need to take a second look. After coffee :)
Maybe could do a sketchnote of the spec to help us. It's pretty dense and not fun to read. Tons of details but not enough 20k feet view
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Plenty of diagrams and visual explanations coming in v2+
The current homepage doesn't explain it well (my doing), but we shipped a flawed draft to get feedback
The spec will stay reasonably technical/detailed, but the docs surrounding it can/will provide larger (visual!) context
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Please do share specifics of where you get stuck / requests for visuals 🙏
Here to listen and make it comprehensible to others. We know too much within the team and hard to see it with fresh eyes.
which uses cases do you want to enable ? Sketch a few user stories.
Insert, render looks old fashion but decent. The entities part is awkward. Hyper restrictive, heavy for a host, not reusing web standards like RDF or at least explain why you didn't use it. some logical flaws