Hail! Brave new world!
Some say all this Internet stuff is just hype. But it's really historic: We're witnessing the beginnings of a fundamental change in how people perceive and use computers. Dr. GUI hasn't had this much fun since, well, the advent of the GUI. In fact, he feels sorry for recently retired friends who are missing out on all this excitement. They've told him not to waste his pity.
The fundamental change, somewhat oversimplified, is this: In the old world, computers were primarily for computing. In the new world, computers are primarily for communicating. This is the day the world changed. To quote Douglas Adams, "When the ocean arrives, the river rules don't apply anymore." A number of things that didn't seem crucial yesterday are absolutely crucial today. For instance, standards and interoperability have an importance they never had before—if you have a worldwide publishing system, what good is it to publish Web applications if everyone can't use them?
Dr. GUI hasn't revealed this before, but he attended not one, but two Internet development conferences in recent months.
If you were at the Microsoft Internet Professional Developers Conference in San Francisco, you may have seen Dr. GUI: He was the kinda weird guy with the stethoscope around his neck. As Oscar Wilde said, "Everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco." Clearly, that's not the secret. The secret is—promise not to tell your UNIX friends—that Dr. GUI earlier attended, incognito (i.e., sans stethoscope), the Netscape Internet Developer Conference.
It was at Netscape's conference that Dr. GUI first met a new breed of person who programs: HTML designers. They're not traditional programmers. They're not scientists or engineers or accountants. They're creative types: Writers, musicians, artists, and so forth. And they're doing programming—in HTML.
Since the dawn of electronic computing, people have taken up programming only when the effort of learning promises something so compelling they must be able to do it themselves. People who work a lot with numbers—engineers, scientists, and accountants—took up programming to avoid tedious manual calculations. For Dr. GUI, it was a power thing—nothing else in Dr. GUI's life would do what he wanted.
For HTML designers, the compelling reason to take up programming isn't computing pi or databases or games. It's communication. For people whose lives revolve around self-expression, being able to publish cheaply and easily to the whole world by programming in HTML is very compelling.
True, today's HTML isn't object-oriented, buzzword-compliant, or otherwise cool. Neither is assembly language. HTML is about as complicated as assembly language, at least in Dr. GUI's book. So the way Dr. GUI figures it, it's a small step from HTML to Visual Basic Scripting Edition. And another small step from there to Visual Basic. It's not much harder to learn Java. And once you've got HTML, VBScript, VB, and Java under your belt, you can program most anything you like, short of device drivers and operating systems. So Dr. GUI warmly welcomes these newcomers to the world of programming—and if you know any newcomers, Dr. GUI hopes you'll welcome them, too.
The major theme of Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference was simple: "Activate the Internet." In other words, make Web pages (or applications) live, not dead. The really interesting Web applications are those with which you can interact, not those that are static.
Microsoft's name for the technologies that activate the Internet is "ActiveX." Dr. GUI will explain ActiveX later.
But wait! There's more! There's all sorts of cool technology for security, Active VRML, distributed COM, standards-based enhancements to HTML, and even great support for Java. It all makes Dr. GUI's head spin. Can someone call a real doctor?
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 will soon be available in beta. When it is, download it and look at the demo pages. I think you'll agree that this is a major step toward activating the Internet! Although Dr. GUI certainly has a bias, his survey tells no lies: 4 out of 5 developers recommend Microsoft technology for their patients who develop for the Internet.
Dr. GUI was asked scores of questions about Microsoft and the Internet during the conference. Unfortunately, he didn't get a chance to write down exact questions nor the names of people who asked them, so he's summarizing and paraphrasing questions that y'all asked multiple times.
Of course, he was asked and asked and asked about ActiveX. More than one person has suggested that it sounds like an ingredient in something you'd take for heartburn. But after investigation, Dr. GUI's happy to report that it is actually just what the doctor ordered to relieve the pain of static content on the Internet.