Web-Dedicated Metacard

[Alain Farmer]

> So, what kinds of strategies can anyone suggest to
> take this beyond the "consensus reality" barrier?

Start with the unparalleled interactivity &
performance of REAL software like MetaCard, versus
mere web-browser based access to HTML + JavaScript.
For example: once the web page is rendered, can you
move things around? *NO*. It's a fundamentally static
interface. With MC, OTOH, you can move things around
at will, do drag-and-drop, view [scripted]
object-oriented drawings and animations, trap all
keyboard keys, have a custom menubar, update other
stacks relationally ... Try doing any of this with the
all-too-popular web-based HTML + JavaScript stuff!

> The answer is typically "Well, that's nice, but
> you are not going to reach as many people...

It all depends on your marketing strategies and
tactics, methinks. Adobe Acrobat pulled it off, didn't
they! Look at it thir way. Provide the Reader freely.
People DL it once and forget it. When you click on a
".pdf" link in the Web, the PDF document is
automatically opened with the Acrobat Reader
program/plugin. Simple. Still very web-based given
that its still going on in the vicinity of your
familiar web-browser (e.g. argument to placate your
detractors). Same goes for MetaCard! You can auto-DL
stacks on the fly ... If you don't tell em it's MC,
the users will probably think that you are providing
them with high-performance Java applets!  ;-)

> How many are going to download your plugin?

Download the player once, forget thereafter; your web
experience, while remaining familiar, will be
immensely more stimulating, interactive, and so on,
and so on ... than ever before. Here's a further idea
to make it even simpler: you might want to design into
your stacks the ability to automatically and
transparently contact your server in order to
auto-update itself whenever necessary e.g. instead of
pestering the user to manually update on a periodic
basis like many programs/plugins do.

> You still have to get them to go via a
> browser and download your stuff...

This is a spurious argument, especially given my above
suggestions. Besides, you could also use your custom
MC-clients as web-savvy programs that the user may not
even know is a "web" program. Imagine for a moment, as
I do, a widely distributed network of MC clients and
servers acting as one collective distributed entity.
Or, more usually, imagine what this could do for your
LAN and/or Intranet.

> Why not just put it up in html
> in the first place.

With HTML, content, content-structure, presentation
and interactivity are all intertwined. The least they
could do for flexibility and inter-operability is to
code the content with XML. In which case, you also
have to deal with the CSS and some other related W3C
technologies and standards. In which case, it's more
complicated to do it this way than the xCard way, and
far less *reusable*. In stack form, you can output
your content as HTML, XML, in database format, as a
CGI, and so on.

It's time for all xCards to show their colours and
take their right-honorable-place on the podium of
excellence, and consequently somewhat displacing the
lowest-common-denominator that we have grown used to
since 1995, but all for the better!

Persuaded yet?  ;-)

Alain Farmer
xCard fanatic

PS: I should probably mention that in addition to all
of the above, the Java version of FreeCard will be
able to be embedded into web-pages in the same manner
that Java applets are. No separate program or plugin;
the stack in a portion of the web-page. Or vice-versa,
I am told, so that we will be able to browse the web
inside a widget of the stack's interface. Yup! the web
from *within* a stack.

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