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4.0 out of 5 stars
you can also have locally run programs, June 4, 2007
This review is from: X Internet: The Executable and Extendable Internet (Hardcover)
The book is strongly concerned about providing design guidelines for programmers writing graphics programs, with which users are expected to interact. So there's a lot of advice about best practices for what widgets to use, how to lay them out, and how not to overwhelm the user.
It also describes the authoring of video and audio for the Internet. Plus numerous other programs. There is a good variety and richness of topics, that shows how the Internet is getting well built out.
But it should also be clear that it is not necessarily all about the Internet. Some programs are best meant for running locally on your machine. Ajax is mentioned, for enhancing the client side experience on the browser. But even this cannot match the richness of a (well-designed) locally run program.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Future of the Internet and Internet-connected devices? Or writing a multimedia webpage?, January 13, 2008
This review is from: X Internet: The Executable and Extendable Internet (Hardcover)
First, let me warn you that I gave a 3-stars ("medium") rating because I have not read this book. But just reading the peek that Amazon allows, I am very confused as to its purpose and the author's lack of touching on accessibility issues. Let me explain.
If you read through the table of contents, it seems the book is mainly about how to build a multimedia website -- glaringy overlooking the biggest problem with the vast majority of multimedia websites today, that is, lack of accessibility to the deaf, blind, handicapped, visually challenged, and more. But more about that in a minute.
In contrast, reading the introductory pages gives you the feeling that the author is trying to predict what the future of the Internet and the Electronic Age will be. We are already beyond the era of "simple webpages" and well into the Internet as a business medium. However, most Internet-connected devices are currently very specialized and limited in scope and function. The author attempts to paint a vision of the future, where most devices are connected to the Internet and applications are "pushed" to them when they connect...but the amount of data a device receives is "limited"??? That confuses me, because what would be the purpose of on-demand applications, except to access data of one sort or another.
This is why the author's lack of a chapter (or 2 or 3) regarding the poor state of Internet Accessibility is so unexplainable...as long as most writers of software, hardware, websites, business applications, multimedia, and so forth choose to ignore the lack of accessibility to the disabled and those with other challenges, which prevent a large proportion of using the Internet right now (relatively simple though it is, compared to this vision of the future) -- how could this vision called "X-Internet" even get started?
Also, I wonder how these people can propose to call this vision "X", considering "X" is currently a Window Mangement system for computers running Linux. I could see people getting the terminology more confused when you consider that in Linux and Unix, the desktop can be run by one computer for the benefit of a user interacting via another computer, completely transparently. It even seems that the term "X-Internet" may have been purposely appropriated for just this reason. But it's even worse when they propose to call the technology in general just plain "X", since a technology called "X" already exists.
This book might still be an interesting read, but I think I will wait until I see some more reviews that are more detailed about just where this book delves.
Besides, without in-depth coverage of accessibility (and such an Internet vision as this requires in-depth coverage because it would depend on addressing the severe shortcomings that presently exist), this book could in no way be considered an authoritive or even an influential discussion of "X-Internet".
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