"...Hence the problem with the amorphous blob that is
Microsoft .Net. The company is doing everything it can to sell .Net
as an open infrastructure, but it's all about control.
For example, Microsoft wants you to believe that its commitment
to XML means that you'll be able to share .Net-based information
across dissimilar platforms. Hogwash. All XML amounts to is a
standard way of pointing to things. XML doesn't have anything to
say about whether the things it points to also conform to
standards.
A perfectly standard XML file can say, "This thing is a title,
this other thing is a menu, and this last thing is an ActiveX
component." If your platform doesn't support ActiveX components,
that's too bad. Since it's a foregone conclusion that Microsoft
will be littering its XML with pointers to Win32-based components,
the best that can be said about its adoption of XML is that it will
make it easier for browsers and applications on non-Windows
platforms to understand which parts of the document it must
ignore.
If Microsoft was genuinely interested in XML as a means to
greater interoperability, it would guarantee that its Office
applications and .Net development tools would produce XML files
that never point to Win32-specific components. Instead, whenever
XML files point to active content, such as an executable component,
that executable content should be platform-neutral. And we all know
what that means, folks: Java, the environment Microsoft is dropping
from future versions of Windows."
