OReily's Internet Operating System FTW!!

I'm glad OReily wrote his post "The State of the Internet Operating System." I agree with it a lot.

I said this years ago. In fact, I'll repeat the idea here: just like early video devs went through hell writing to non-standard graphic card memory models, early web devs have had to struggle with non-standard serialization and presentation formats.

And just like back then, a crop of "device drivers" slowly formed (first from DOS systems like Miles Sound System, etc. then later via the OS) -- well it's happening now: people fed up with the conflicting standards of the w3c and webdev-hell have had it and are starting to create "web-standard" independent "drivers" -- like webkit, like jquery -- that don't care what version of HTML browser or CSS you really have, that degrade gracefully by offering "hardware abstractions" (or in this case browser and w3c standards abstractions!) And javascript is rapidly becoming the language of the new platform because no-one else is moving fast enough.

In my mind it's time to put the W3C to bed where they belong -- leave them as keepers of a data standard to the semantic web, but for crying out loud, give the presentation devs a standard platform we can actually code to with the solidity and flexibility of postscript or renderman!

IMHO, the next steps (great leaps forward) are standard serialization formats. Who gives a flying &#&#@ if you are doing a GET or a POST or a JSON or an xml, or java-to-javascript, or what the hell have you -- SERIOUSLY, it's as insane as memory management was before contiguous memory controllers (does anyone remember those days?) -- it's all state serialization, it should have a freakin standard way of writing and reading no matter where it comes from or where it goes to -- I'm not talking implementation details, I'm talking raw syntax.

ActiveRecord and JSON begins to get close to this, but we've got a LONG way to go before I can just say "give me an address from the database and post it to that RESTful service and write it to a memory cache over there -- and it's all the same damn syntax! Why reinvent the wheel 80 bazillion times?

/rant off