Over the past months, we’ve received 10 or so notes from programmers expressing their frustration with the many shortcomings of HTML. The XML and ECMAscript standards solve part of this problem, but not all of it. Proprietary solutions like Eastgate’s Storyspace are superior, but we all know what the future of proprietary solutions is.
Silicon Prairie received this note from Pierre-Etienne Chartier last week: “If you need something more flexible and powerful than HTML but don’t want to go to SGML, a very good product has been developed at a German university. It used to be known as Hyper-G, but is now called Hyperwave. The product is rooted on the Web, but has been allowed to grow from there and solves many of the problems programmers are now having with HTML and the Web. The hyperlinks are bidirectional, all the links are constantly updated in a database keeping broken links to a minimum and the client-server architecture is much more advanced. One of the big features is accessibility from a standard web browser. I suggest you take a look at it.”
About two years ago, I played around with Hyper-G, after reading about it in “Wired.” I came away from it the way I do most new-and-improved solutions: intrigued but unsatisfied. The outline view it offered on the left rail has been adopted by many Web-site designers, as well as the folks at Microsoft determining the channel structure on Internet Explorer 4. But the explicitly hierarchical structure is limiting, and it seemed that the only people designing sites for Hyper-G worked for the German company that marketed the program.
Hyperwave is similar in structure to Hyper-G but much improved in interface, linking structure and a mixture of client and server capabilities. If Hyperwave catches on, it will do so in closed systems or Intranets, where delivering richness of data is often more important than adhering to common standards. Visit the Hyperwave site and learn more, but chances are you’ll incorporate what you learn into your HTML-workaround programming rather than anything explicitly for a Hyperwave platform.
Contest news
When we kick off a new contest next week, we’ll have two prizes, just donated by Borland International. They’ve supplied us with shrink-wrapped copies of their Delphi and C++ Builder RAD tools. Don’t forget to return September 18 for a chance to win one of them.
One final note on last week’s contest, courtesy of Paul Surma:
“Regarding your recent Final Debug C++ contest and answers, it would have been helpful to give a (partial) class description. Two unknowns seem rather important.
1.What is mData? One assumes that it is a typical C/C++ NUL terminated ASCII string.
2.What value is stored in mLength? Is it the strlen() of the character string in mData, or the length of the allocated buffer. As everyone knows, the buffer needs to be one more than the strlen()in order to account for the (assumed string’s) terminating NUL character.”
Paul has a point: Come back next week and find out if we deliver enough information for you to win some software.
