Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The base of the requirements is that these meme media object have to be available
online and located from an arbitrary browser running on an arbitrary OS, and there, in
the browser they should be fully functional, editable and re- distributional. The object
should also be fairly easy to develop, preferably in a well-known programming lan-
guage and have extended and rich graphical possibilities which should be easily im-
plemented by either programmers or designers. Finally these objects should not be
bound by commercial products or demands, but instead mainly rest on open source, or
at least freeware, foundation.
Today we are, if not entirely, still very close to that vision. Therefore the limita-
tions of the Webble, the Webble widget and the Webble application lies more or less
completely within the limitations of the imagination of the human resources, except
within the fields we will explain in the next section. The environment is free and open
and the pieces comes in all shapes and forms and can even be reconfigured into even
more still. This 'meme Lego' which even takes the original concept of IntelligentPad
even further, these Webbles, may be the next stepping stone toward the true idea of a
shared mind.
2.3
Obstacles and Problems
This might sound like a system designers dream, not to mention the dream of numer-
ous creative Internet users who today lacks appropriate tools for their creativity. But
in practice there have been many obstacles and problems, even in the end, regular
showstoppers (missing essential features or embedded restrictions). It has gone so far
that Webble World 3.0 which has just begun being developed will not use Silverlight
anymore.
Every implementation of IntelligentPad has carried with them various issues that
hindered or damaged parts of the promised experience or possibilities. Though we
will not explain much further what those issues were before Webble World (like for
example difficulties ranging from shape restrictions, problems of pad distributions
across users, copyrights issues, development restrictions to preserve generic usage
and the one still lingering, sandbox and cross-domain restrictions), we would like to
involve you more thoroughly in the problems with this latest version.
Silverlight, like every other common web technology, is heavily sand-boxed, may-
be even more so than most. The reason for this is of course security and to keep mali-
cious websites from being able to do nasty things to the user's computer, but the result
is also that a lot of cool and important ways to connect servers and tools with each
other gets severely limited. There are solutions and hacks to get around it, but they do
not always suffice and they are never pretty.
Silverlight does not work well with HTML either. Every attempt to blend them in a
website is riddled with problems and ugly hacks that in the end is not even close to
what the developer intended to do. Pure Silverlight sights, or small independent isl-
ands of Silverlight inside a HTML page works kind of okay, but anything beyond that
is a nightmare, which of course is extremely problematic for Webble World which
tries to connect all sort of web sites and web solutions in a seamless way.
