A Free XML-Based Operating System

Dotnaught writes "For the past five years, Xcerion has been working on an XML-based Internet operating system (XIOS) that runs inside a Web browser and promises radically reduced development time. To provide developers with an incentive to write for the platform, Xcerion's back-end system is designed to route revenue, either from subscription fees or from ads served to users of free programs, to application authors. Think of it as Google AdSense, except for programmers rather than publishers. Is it absurd to think this poses a threat to Google and Microsoft?"

Validation for the website

[Anonymous Coward]

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .xcerion.com%2F [w3.org]

Those guys can't even put down proper HTML, I'm not sure i'd trust them to write a whole web-based "OS" in XML

Why require a browser

[broothal]

Back in the late 80's when I got on the net we all had a pretty good idea what "the internet" was. Now, 20 years later, the internet is almost synonymous with WWW. I'd like to see good solutions taking advantage of the internet, but why does it always have to require a web browser?

Re:Not an 'Operating System'

[julesh]

And by the looks of the company site, it's vapourware. They have a "sign up to beta test" button on the home page, but when you fill in the form (*after you fill in the form*) they tell you you've been added to their list of people to send news about the thing.

don't think so

[oohshiny]

Xcerion is merely jumping onto the XML bandwagon and doing some nimble marketing around it.

In fact, we have an OS-independent XML-based layer, and it's called xulrunner (Firefox, Mozilla, and Thunderbird are popular applications written in it). It's getting a more powerful language with JIT support soon (ECMAScript 2.0).

Microsoft has already caught on an has been trying to develop their own, proprietary alternative, though they aren't as far along.

There are also some other attempts at this with slightly different perspectives on the same problem, like Konfabulator, Dashboard, Java, and .NET, but their success has been more limited in this area, although some of them have found other uses.

Re:Bad XML

[thogard]

But XML is a great interchange format for all those coders who couldn't pass Comp Sci 201. There are plenty of great papers on why XML style parsing was bad and some of them even have mathematical proofs and predate any *ML implementation. D. Knuth and A. Perlis both had nasty things to say about that type of parsing long before it existed but I guess their books aren't fashionable for modern coders.