An im session with a co-worker talking over one of my blog entries from the weekend forced me to actually go and read Jon Udell's Byte peice about Universal Canvas. Now the fact is that Universal Canvas is really what ActiveX (nee OLE) was meant to achieve. It didn't. Why?
Universal Canvas can be seen to be another phrasing of "universal document" into which many different things can be slotted into. This works (to some degree) for a large chunk of content - in fact everything that can be viewed as a document.
But, have you ever tried to think about an MP3 player as a document? You can think of the individual songs as documents, you can also think of the play lists as documents. But the player itself, which sits proudly on many desktops, is not a document.
Now try and view an ssh client as a document. Err. You can view the site list as documents. Maybe even the various logs it generates. But the ssh client? How about a web browser? A news aggregator? An email client? In fact all the tools I use on a day to day basis?
The two tools that I do use on a near daily basis that are document centric are MSWord and MSVisio. And sometimes I wish I could interact with Visio in a non document centric fashion.
There are too many exceptions to the "document centric" world for a universal canvas to actually work. That, and the fact that a try Universal Canvas would mean the rest of my life would be trapped inside MSWord. UGH!
11:26:38 AM 
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