A Searchable Catalog with HTML/OS
By Michael Floyd
If you think about it, we've been trying to extend HTML from almost the very moment that Tim Berners-Lee created it. Mostly, we can thank the browser wars for elements like frames and tables, client-side scripting languages like JavaScript and VBScript, and the embedding of components through Java applets and ActiveX controls. But with a cheap communications infrastructure already in place, no one could ever have imagined the pace at which technologies would adapt to the Web, demanding more and more from HTML in the process. Unfortunately, these extensions, while useful, break under less than ideal conditions. Eventually, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) would concede that the gap between the approved language and proposed extensions was too great and that the standards body could no longer keep pace. That's what XML is all about.
The question is, what do developers do until XML takes shape? Urged on by one of our readers, I recently took a look at an alternative to extending the HTML environment: Aestiva's HTML/OS. I must say, I was impressed. HTML/OS is an extensible development environment that lets you create Web applications. The core of HTML/OS lies in an extended tagging language that can be embedded in HTML documents. But HTML/OS is far more than a set of programming extensions to HTML; it's a complete environment that executes on the server and negotiates a variety of services ranging from user login, permissions, and tracking to database and Web security.
