François Chahuneau, AIS, France, continued on the same theme with XML for Client-Side Applications, but from a different perspective. While server-side applications can make use of structured information, server-side applications cannot scale up. Further, it is difficult to integrate different applications or application components at the user level. Client-side applications provide this ability to grow with the number of users/applications, and with Java some processing can be pushed to the client.
However, as Chahuneau expressed it, HTML is simply too limited ; Java needs something to chew on. He typified XML as the missing part. With HTML, the application objects, which remained on the server, were converted to HTML and the Java applets processed the HTML presentation objects. With XML, the application objects can be moved across the network to the client where Java applets can work with application objects and then apply presentation rules. All of this assumes, of course that there will be XML browsers.
Chahuneau, taking a view of the browser industry, thinks that it may be too late to compete with the likes of Microsoft and Netscape. Instead, he suggests taking existing browsers and make them XML-able.
This could be accomplished by adding machinery to the client side, such as that on server side, i.e., take XML fragments, do something useful to them, and then convert them to HTML.
Chahuneau followed this with a couple demonstrations where the XML coming from the server is intercepted, manipulated by a local application, and converted on-the-fly to HTML for viewing in a standard industry browser. Whilst this means more layers of software and conversion to HTML, with its limited linking capabilities, this is a solution that shows that XML can be used today without waiting for the mainstream players to implement XML support.
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