8 ms·

i remember when these compound documents with embedded objects were all the rage in the 90s. in microsoft land it was all ole and activex (which seems like it u

by a-dub 3y ago

i remember when these compound documents with embedded objects were all the rage in the 90s. in microsoft land it was all ole and activex (which seems like it ultimately only saw real use as a browser plugin standard). seems the most interesting one was the japanese system that recently graced these pages, can't remember the name now...

turnsout 3y ago
It’s hard not to think this 90s “document turducken” trend was driven by engineers, rather than coming out of any real user need. We still don’t work this way, though it would be easier than ever now with web technology. It turns out, links work just fine and are dramatically simpler on both a conceptual and technical level.
- aaronharnly 3y ago
  I agree. Though the “spreadsheet table in a document” use case was always the first demo, and is still a common use case. It was probably also the only real use case with any staying power.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    Having the full power of an image editor on any picture anywhere was the second. Sometimes I think there was something to that architecture. Sometimes it just seems overly complex.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    "Chart based on a spreadsheet that you can update later" is the real place it shines. If you try to have two documents, the spreadsheet always gets lost.
- detourdog 3y ago
  I was an idealist at the time and was very much on board with SOM (system object model by IBM COM was Microsoft model). The people who truly knew what they were doing always had turnsout position. Cyberdog was the only application I used as my daily drivers for all things internet. None of the other exampls ended up being useful in anyway. My guess is that SOM and COM are the type of tech only a behemoth could love.
  - KerrAvon 3y ago
    turnsout position? Cyberdog was the only good use of OpenDoc I ever saw, and it was never interesting as a part of OpenDoc. It was just really good set of internet apps that happened to be implemented as OpenDoc parts. If the developers had implemented them as regular Mac apps, Apple would have been ahead of the game.
    - detourdog 3y ago
      Turnsout stated in the earlier post that it wasn't practical. I was responding that I remember disregarding the same sentiment from people trying to teach me. I thought cyberdog was great and definitely used until as my mine internet app for mail and browsing until at IE 5 on Aqua and Mail.app.
- a-dub 3y ago
  links?! lol have you ever actually seen the modern web front end tech planet up close? i mean, i agree i'm with ya. links are all you really need, but you know...
  - turnsout 3y ago
    That was my point—you can do all kinds of things on the web now, but people don’t really create these multi source meta-documents. Unless you count a TikTok embed or something.
    - a-dub 3y ago
      looks like there's some limited cross application embedding support in google docs, so i'd argue you're right except for one glaring exception.... jupyter notebooks and donald knuth's literate programming dream. duh duh dunnnnn. crash buut. to your point, maybe there's a fable in there. existing large systems should be coupled in interface and presentation, but not necessarily in implementation!
adzm 3y ago
Well a lot of custom controls worked using this technology, including Internet Explorer and the Windows Shell and Explorer themselves. Ultimately though it was the web that implemented the end goal of interactive, linked documents and components though.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Only sort of. <iframe> can embed arbitrary web content, but this power is only available if you're writing bare HTML. Apps like Google Docs which ordinary users can actually use don't actually give you this power. Their internal document models aren't HTML and they don't even render to DOM anymore, they render to canvas. Furthermore there's a growing movement to slowly deprecate certain embedding use cases. Embedded sites could always pop themselves out of the current page, but there's now also HTTP headers that let you explicitly forbid embedding on either end. This is actually considered a security best practice[0] as there are crafty XSRF attacks that could be enabled by, say, layering an invisible iframe in front of your cursor that just so happens to be open and scrolled to the "send all my money to someone" button on your bank account. Timing attacks apparently also rely on embedding, so anyone who wants to use, say, shared-memory multithreading for WASM[1] has to also opt out of both being embedded and being allowed to embed other sites. [0] According to people begging for bug bounty money [1] i.e. Ruffle
  - zubairq 3y ago
    Agreed. Also, IFrames don't really compose well, or give easy communication between parent and child IFrames in the same way that components can set attributes and call methods on each other
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Present tense, a lot of custom controls work using this technology. COM has had the spotlight of Windows APIs since Windows Vista took the .NET ideas for Longhorn and re-did them in COM/C++.

by a-dub 3y ago

turnsout 3y ago

It’s hard not to think this 90s “document turducken” trend was driven by engineers, rather than coming out of any real user need. We still don’t work this way, though it would be easier than ever now with web technology. It turns out, links work just fine and are dramatically simpler on both a conceptual and technical level.

aaronharnly 3y ago
I agree. Though the “spreadsheet table in a document” use case was always the first demo, and is still a common use case. It was probably also the only real use case with any staying power.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Having the full power of an image editor on any picture anywhere was the second. Sometimes I think there was something to that architecture. Sometimes it just seems overly complex.
- bombcar 3y ago
  "Chart based on a spreadsheet that you can update later" is the real place it shines. If you try to have two documents, the spreadsheet always gets lost.
detourdog 3y ago
I was an idealist at the time and was very much on board with SOM (system object model by IBM COM was Microsoft model). The people who truly knew what they were doing always had turnsout position. Cyberdog was the only application I used as my daily drivers for all things internet. None of the other exampls ended up being useful in anyway. My guess is that SOM and COM are the type of tech only a behemoth could love.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  turnsout position? Cyberdog was the only good use of OpenDoc I ever saw, and it was never interesting as a part of OpenDoc. It was just really good set of internet apps that happened to be implemented as OpenDoc parts. If the developers had implemented them as regular Mac apps, Apple would have been ahead of the game.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    Turnsout stated in the earlier post that it wasn't practical. I was responding that I remember disregarding the same sentiment from people trying to teach me. I thought cyberdog was great and definitely used until as my mine internet app for mail and browsing until at IE 5 on Aqua and Mail.app.
a-dub 3y ago
links?! lol have you ever actually seen the modern web front end tech planet up close? i mean, i agree i'm with ya. links are all you really need, but you know...
- turnsout 3y ago
  That was my point—you can do all kinds of things on the web now, but people don’t really create these multi source meta-documents. Unless you count a TikTok embed or something.
  - a-dub 3y ago
    looks like there's some limited cross application embedding support in google docs, so i'd argue you're right except for one glaring exception.... jupyter notebooks and donald knuth's literate programming dream. duh duh dunnnnn. crash buut. to your point, maybe there's a fable in there. existing large systems should be coupled in interface and presentation, but not necessarily in implementation!

adzm 3y ago

Well a lot of custom controls worked using this technology, including Internet Explorer and the Windows Shell and Explorer themselves. Ultimately though it was the web that implemented the end goal of interactive, linked documents and components though.

kmeisthax 3y ago
Only sort of. <iframe> can embed arbitrary web content, but this power is only available if you're writing bare HTML. Apps like Google Docs which ordinary users can actually use don't actually give you this power. Their internal document models aren't HTML and they don't even render to DOM anymore, they render to canvas. Furthermore there's a growing movement to slowly deprecate certain embedding use cases. Embedded sites could always pop themselves out of the current page, but there's now also HTTP headers that let you explicitly forbid embedding on either end. This is actually considered a security best practice[0] as there are crafty XSRF attacks that could be enabled by, say, layering an invisible iframe in front of your cursor that just so happens to be open and scrolled to the "send all my money to someone" button on your bank account. Timing attacks apparently also rely on embedding, so anyone who wants to use, say, shared-memory multithreading for WASM[1] has to also opt out of both being embedded and being allowed to embed other sites. [0] According to people begging for bug bounty money [1] i.e. Ruffle
- zubairq 3y ago
  Agreed. Also, IFrames don't really compose well, or give easy communication between parent and child IFrames in the same way that components can set attributes and call methods on each other
pjmlp 3y ago
Present tense, a lot of custom controls work using this technology. COM has had the spotlight of Windows APIs since Windows Vista took the .NET ideas for Longhorn and re-did them in COM/C++.