“Software ultimately should facilitate communication � either between people, between people and their desired goals within the computer system or between systems. The increasing abstraction of interfaces plays into the hands of the domain experts, who are ultimately the ones who are paying for the software in the first place.”

A friend of mine, Jack Park sent this link to one of our collaboratories called Blue Oxen. Even though the title of the blog entry is “The future of SVG and the Web”, Kurt Cagle makes some interesting observations about “Data/Platform/Language Independence”. He talks on a wide variety of topics focussed on the liberation of software from proprietory formats and how this will enrich the experience of using applications.

“XML is increasingly abstracting the form of data access, turning complex and arcane queries (and updates) against LDAP servers, SQL databases, web services, mail services and so forth away from dissonant technologies and towards common XML ones. XML based XGUIs abstract the underlying platform interfaces and turn them increasingly into XML-oriented virtual machines that can degrade gracefully in the face of more limited capabilities, and makes such religious issues as Java vs. C++ vs. C# vs. flavor of the month language irrelevant”

While I am mildly interested in SVG, I read the post because Jack sent it and I am glad I did.