I don't even use Safari. I just think that "so far behind" is polarizing and inaccurate. It's not the most innovative browser, and I wish it would be updated more frequently, but it's hardly "far behind". Now, if you look at IE 6 (which, mind you, is still the most recent final release of IE, and thus still the default browser on many, many Windows installations), that warrants using the words "far behind".
I'm hoping that, with the release of Safari 3.0 in Leopard, Tiger users will at least receive a minor 2.1 update.
This might be pretty nice. Firefox does offer a "highlight all" but no "dim everything else". They both perform the same function, which is better is probably a matter of personal preference.
Is this fixing a bug or adding a feature?
OK, maybe this is pretty nice. Some sites only provide a tiny post-entry area.
Firefox = Memory Hog. I use firefox, but i can't wait til safari gets their act together with 3.0
I don't think that's the only interpretation - for all we know, it may be released mid-June. Then there's the semi-obligatory few months of waiting to make sure all the compatibility issues are resolved before using it on a production computer, so that's possibly a year out.
I guess it depends on your production. (To be fair, I didn't upgrade to 10.4 until I had finished my dissertation research, about six months, but solely because I was using the internals of gcc 3.3 and didn't want to risk the migration to a default gcc 4.0, which would have horribly broken everything... turned out it would have been fine, but...)
I think what Chucker was saying, Ireland, is that Safari is made of a number of pieces: the UI end, which is the application, and the back end, which is WebKit/WebCore. The UI end will undoubtedly be upgraded in Leopard, and use Leopard-only features, but the backend could easily be updated right under the current Safari UI on Tiger as well. So, he's hoping that when Leopard comes out with the new versions of both the Safari app, and WebKit/WebCore, that the latter will also be migrated to Tiger so folks there can get the benefits of the increased standards compliance as well.
I will likely get Leopard, but I would appreciate if those who stay on Tiger a little longer (some might even have to, seeing as Leopard has slightly higher system requirements) can still benefit from a significantly improved WebKit engine, without having to rely on nightly builds, which will eventually probably be Leopard-only too.
Apple did the same with the release of Tiger; Safari 1.3 for Panther had the same engine as Safari 2.0 for Tiger. Also, Panther 10.3.9 introduced support for Universal and GCC 4-compiled Binaries.
I guess it depends on your production. (To be fair, I didn't upgrade to 10.4 until I had finished my dissertation research, about six months, but solely because I was using the internals of gcc 3.3 and didn't want to risk the migration to a default gcc 4.0, which would have horribly broken everything... turned out it would have been fine, but...)
You definitely don't want to upgrade software in the middle of any project where that software is critical to the project.
Even for home use, I waited several months to fully switch despite having bought Tiger the first weekend it was out. I switched between the two pretty gradually until enough issues were resolved to use it exclusively.
No. Explorer 7 has rearrangeable tabs, but it does not let you turn a tab into its own window. Also, Explorer 7 does not highlight search terms on a page, nor does it allow textareas to be resized.
Both of these are available as a 3rd party (micro-play?)add-on now, I assumed they'll be included in the official release. I didn't know they don't come included with the beta because i didn't install it on my work computer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chucker
Which is unlikely to ever happen. There's no good business reason for Microsoft to do that.
Well, with the intel chip, I thought it would be somewhat easier to move pc apps to mac, so with relatively little effort they could try to get switchers to mac to keep using their pc browser. This would make sense since there should be more switchers now that the GPU jargon is the same, and bootcamp can help the transition be smoother. Maybe not a huge moneymaker, but i'm sure microsoft would like to keep their brand on as many macs as possible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chucker
There is nothing whatsoever Safari-related that Apple has announced in the recent past.
Maybe you're not giving Apple enough credit here. Demonstrating something at an Apple developers' conference, while it might not be an official media announcement, is still an announcement of sorts, especially among the tiny minority that actually nerds on internet browsers... A media savvy company like apple knows how to balance official and unofficial announcements just like video game manufacturers and the white house.
He probably could provide more examples but why should he if you're going to pull the same stunt over and over again?
I think it's sufficiently clear that you've got your mind set and that you've shut yourself from all other browsers...which is perfectly fine. Just don't come in here and ask people to do your homework.
Both of these are available as a 3rd party (micro-play?)add-on now,
First, I'm not aware of such add-ons, and second, that's completely off-the-point. When comparing products, you compare what features they come with directly, not what additional features you could have by additng additional products. For what it's worth, I'm typing this with Internet Explorer 7, which also happens to be my default browser while using Windows Vista pre-releases, even though alternatives such as Firefox would work fine; I'm quite okay with using IE. But I'm also apparently more aware of what it doesn't do and does do than you are.
Internet Explorer 7 does not let you extract tabs into their own windows (Safari 3 does).
Internet Explorer 7 does not support search highlighting (Safari 3 does), nor incremental search (Safari 3 and Firefox 1.0 do).
Internet Explorer 7 does not let you resize a text box (Safari 3 does; OmniWeb 5 sort of does by making a new window with the text box, which is a neat alternative implementation).
Internet Explorer 7 does have a phishing filter, but that is about all it has going for it, compared to Firefox 1.5 and Safari 2.0, both of which are out right now and have been for a long time.
Internet Explorer 7 also has a zoom feature, which neither Firefox nor Safari currently implement, although Opera does and has for a long time. However, Opera's and Internet Explorer's zoom is so terribly broken you wouldn't really want to use it anyway unless you absolutely had to.
Quote:
Well, with the intel chip, I thought it would be somewhat easier to move pc apps to mac,
The CPU architecture has little bearing on that. You can virtualize Windows (Parallels, VMWare), you can run Windows through dual-boot (BootCamp) and you can even run Internet Explorer 6 directly inside Mac OS through API emulation (Wine/CrossOver), but to make an actual Mac app, the effort is about as big or small as it was with PowerPC.
Quote:
Maybe you're not giving Apple enough credit here. Demonstrating something at an Apple developers' conference, while it might not be an official media announcement, is still an announcement of sorts
That was almost two months ago and is unrelated to the alleged news in the article discussed here. You were implying that the article referred to an announcement of Apple's, which it did not.
He probably could provide more examples but why should he if you're going to pull the same stunt over and over again?
I think it's sufficiently clear that you've got your mind set and that you've shut yourself from all other browsers...which is perfectly fine. Just don't come in here and ask people to do your homework.
I admit that my initial post to this thread was based on a misunderstanding.
I thought this was resolved in post #41 by Chucker. I don't see why you might call it homework. It's just that I've used Safari and I haven't found enough reason to consider it competitive, unless you compare it to IE6, then it's clearly superior.
I'm not shut off from all other browsers, I just want something that's reasonably close to the top of the game. Text shadows isn't enough. The next version seems to have some neat features, but that's a good half a year away. If it offered an accessible extension architecture with a good community around them, then that may be the killer feature for me. I like Firefox mostly for the small, simple third party extensions, not necessarily for the core software by itself. The extensions I've used for Safari were fairly sizable and either didn't do what I wanted, were overly complex or simply blew up for other reasons, one just got into a loop just trying to get into gmail.
I tried using Firefox but the ugly widgets (which can be somewhat fixed with Firefoxy), weird tabs, lack of native spell checker, lack of Bonjour support and just general sense of it just not being quite right really grates. It's like using a Microsoft app or an old Classic app in OSX. It works, it may have more features, but it's not Mac like at all. Just the way you select text in the address bar annoys the hell out of me.
In the end I switch between Camino (for Gecko testing) and my main browser, Safari. I prefer Safari's CSS and Javascript debuggers too to the Firefox plugins. (see http://webkit.org/blog/?p=41 and http://webkit.org/blog/?p=61 )
Opera - It's nice on my phone, mostly because it doesn't have the desktop interface but that's the only place I'll touch it. Horrible, horrible software.
Just the way you select text in the address bar annoys the hell out of me.
I can't get the behavior to be any different for FF 1.5 or 2.0 compared with Safari 2.0, so I'm not sure what you mean. It's probably long overdue, but there is a spell checker in 2.0. I guess that's not the type of thing I'd notice, I generally don't use spell checkers.
I can't get the behavior to be any different for FF 1.5 or 2.0 compared with Safari 2.0, so I'm not sure what you mean.
They seem to have changed it in 1.5. In 1.0 I remember it was like Windows. Now the only thing it does different to Safari is that it doesn't automatically select urls from the drop down if you've already visited them. Much better but still different.
It's not necessarily worse, just different. The Windows way of selecting text annoys me immensely and that is worse not just different.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffDM
It's probably long overdue, but there is a spell checker in 2.0. I guess that's not the type of thing I'd notice, I generally don't use spell checkers.
I use them everywhere and expect them everywhere to the point that it annoys me when they aren't. I bet they don't use the system spell checker though and have instead implemented their own, thus ignoring all my corrections from American to English.
It depends on what I'm doing. I perfer windows to tabs in some cases, and tabs in others. For instance, if I'm doing something that requires me to look at multiple windows at the same time, and it's too many to set side-by-side, I'll use windows because I can view them all at once via Expose, then quickly go back to my text field. Although this wouldn't work without Expose... It's easier then constantly switching between tabs and having to find where I left off over and over again.
But for normal browsing, I'll use tabs to save space.
get the "showcase fox" extension for firefox. just like expose for firefox tabs.
Most of what you want is already there and it's pretty easy to use.
Make a folder in the bookmarks or bookmarks toolbar and put bookmarks in it.
sorry, jeff, but most of what he wants is NOT in safari :-(
it is not opening a set of bookmarks that is the issue ... it is CREATING a set of bookmarks in the first place that is the problem.
for some unfathomable reason of gross stupidity, apple has _crippled_ safari from being a useable production platform ...
no one can possibly have time to make a bookmark for each tab individually - this could easily take an hour (including all the time it takes to invoke/close the BM window as well as entering all the tags necessary for spotlight - hello! why doesnt safari have a rich tag editor that utilizes the LSA (latent semantic analysis) engine in os/x?!).
for all practical concerns, the total absense in safari of a credible bookmark manager (actually a collection manager more generally) forces busy knowledge workers into some VERY unattractive choices: either they step down to firefox & lose native mac features such as spotlight support, or else they are punished into using camino where they must suffer bizzare rendering glitches as well as glacial load times for the bookmark window (ie 10-20 minutes! which is a horrendous price to pay when one wants to do something as simple as edit the tags in a bookmark one has just created - or if one wants to re-open a tab one has just closed after book-marking ... a feature which firefox does have BTW: sweet!).
neither is a savory alternative.
all because apple will not commit serious resources to safari (the tab set problem is just at the the top of the list ... and the awkward keyboard commands follows closely behind in terms of unnecessary aggrevation.
=> The Bigger Picture: while apple fritters away its chance to do something truly innovative (like create the first browser for the semantic web), it also ignores the opportunity to improve in the mid-range of browser technology - ie UI languages.
yes, the tab & keyboard assignments (Hello embedded Quicksilver!) are the kind of no-brainers that raise the question of why there isnt a deeper, NIB-based editor which (graphically) exposes all the interface components so that they can be scripted, or keyboarded, or voice-enabled etc) .... but what is striking is that apple has (still!) yet to create a formal UI language despite its many years of developing guidelines & indeed (in many cases) many years of best practice in actually implementing UI's.
When the next generation of quicktime is based on mpeg7 & mpeg21, it will be unavoidable to have a proper scene description language ... which is content-based (and driven by meta-data), but does not extend into a description of the Control Language of the UI.
But why wait until everyone & their uncle has figured out a (standardized) representation for description & for action (hello UML2! it is no co-incidince that Action Semantics for model-driven designs are alien for os/x since apple doesnt support any UML in XCode!) ... apple could start now with (non-content based) scene description languages, at first just for the UI elements themselves. A small but robust UI language would be a great way to introduce the concept of formal Action Semantics to developers because a UI has a constricted set of primitives compared to the the content description itself); the goal here is not just obvious stuff like syntax-directed editors for HOL's, but rather the broader vision of BEHAVIORAL
A genuinely dynamic UI would also allow users to start experiencing the greater ease-of-use that is possible when there is an ADAPTIVE UI rather than a static one ... which is a very tangible differentiator for apple products in an era when Microsoft (finally) has some credible infrastructure to compete against apple ...
(remember folks: just because WINFS may or may not be deep-sixed in Vista/Vienna/etc does NOT by any means entail that microsoft still doesnt have one or two other arrows left in its quiver .... ie dotNet3 is capable of supporting some show-stoppers ... Microsoft was forced to proceed without fully exploiting dotNet3 because of all the delays in Longhorn; but this doesnt mean they will have such impediments in the future ... and it is only one step from a widget language to an affordance-based UI language ... so complacency now at Apple, just when Vista is starting a 5 year run of innovation (yeah, yeah, I know - it sounds like an oxymoron), could prove to be a major mistake when it comes to nexgen interfaces (remember: the REAL challenge is not to create ever more elegant abstractions of the data (the machine) or the information (the apps) - but rather creating useful abstractions of the knowledge ... once again: "It's The Semantics Stupid").
The fact that Quartz in Leopard has resolution independence is only one half of the nexgen UI puzzle ... unless the affordance of a UI can be formally expressed (in a scene description language) then each new apple product (like iphone) or each new mac product (like Safari or Aperture etc) will have to have a laboriously hand-crafted UI, which is concomitantly slower to develop & tougher to test than one that is formally ie DECLARATIVELY specified (ie in a functional language like Haskell - cf http://haskell.readscheme.org/gui.html).
While it would be swell for apple to actually show some real long-range initiative viz a browser for the Semantic Web; or even some mid-range improvements in the UI (that are not one-off and years late, but rather part of a systematic approach to Adaptive, model-based, design such as a NIB-based scene description/interaction language) .... i will gladly trade those halcyon days for something as simple in the here & now as some frick'n tab sets!
when thinking of the woeful feature/performance short-coming of safari, i feel like Oliver in Dickens, coming up to the head table in the cruel & indifferent orphanage, where he boldly asks 'more please'; only to be met with shock & dismay that anyone would dare ask for a sufficient level of sustenance!
Comments
Also, I don't think there is any plan to release IE7 for Mac, ever.
Thank the heavens.
I don't even use Safari. I just think that "so far behind" is polarizing and inaccurate. It's not the most innovative browser, and I wish it would be updated more frequently, but it's hardly "far behind". Now, if you look at IE 6 (which, mind you, is still the most recent final release of IE, and thus still the default browser on many, many Windows installations), that warrants using the words "far behind".
I'm hoping that, with the release of Safari 3.0 in Leopard, Tiger users will at least receive a minor 2.1 update.
Why? You not buying Leopard no?
Firefox does all of this now.
This might be pretty nice. Firefox does offer a "highlight all" but no "dim everything else". They both perform the same function, which is better is probably a matter of personal preference.
Is this fixing a bug or adding a feature?
OK, maybe this is pretty nice. Some sites only provide a tiny post-entry area.
Firefox = Memory Hog. I use firefox, but i can't wait til safari gets their act together with 3.0
Why? You not buying Leopard no?
I don't think that's the only interpretation - for all we know, it may be released mid-June. Then there's the semi-obligatory few months of waiting to make sure all the compatibility issues are resolved before using it on a production computer, so that's possibly a year out.
I think what Chucker was saying, Ireland, is that Safari is made of a number of pieces: the UI end, which is the application, and the back end, which is WebKit/WebCore. The UI end will undoubtedly be upgraded in Leopard, and use Leopard-only features, but the backend could easily be updated right under the current Safari UI on Tiger as well. So, he's hoping that when Leopard comes out with the new versions of both the Safari app, and WebKit/WebCore, that the latter will also be migrated to Tiger so folks there can get the benefits of the increased standards compliance as well.
Why? You not buying Leopard no?
I will likely get Leopard, but I would appreciate if those who stay on Tiger a little longer (some might even have to, seeing as Leopard has slightly higher system requirements) can still benefit from a significantly improved WebKit engine, without having to rely on nightly builds, which will eventually probably be Leopard-only too.
Apple did the same with the release of Tiger; Safari 1.3 for Panther had the same engine as Safari 2.0 for Tiger. Also, Panther 10.3.9 introduced support for Universal and GCC 4-compiled Binaries.
I guess it depends on your production.
You definitely don't want to upgrade software in the middle of any project where that software is critical to the project.
Even for home use, I waited several months to fully switch despite having bought Tiger the first weekend it was out. I switched between the two pretty gradually until enough issues were resolved to use it exclusively.
No. Explorer 7 has rearrangeable tabs, but it does not let you turn a tab into its own window. Also, Explorer 7 does not highlight search terms on a page, nor does it allow textareas to be resized.
Both of these are available as a 3rd party (micro-play?)add-on now, I assumed they'll be included in the official release. I didn't know they don't come included with the beta because i didn't install it on my work computer.
Which is unlikely to ever happen. There's no good business reason for Microsoft to do that.
Well, with the intel chip, I thought it would be somewhat easier to move pc apps to mac, so with relatively little effort they could try to get switchers to mac to keep using their pc browser. This would make sense since there should be more switchers now that the GPU jargon is the same, and bootcamp can help the transition be smoother. Maybe not a huge moneymaker, but i'm sure microsoft would like to keep their brand on as many macs as possible.
There is nothing whatsoever Safari-related that Apple has announced in the recent past.
Maybe you're not giving Apple enough credit here. Demonstrating something at an Apple developers' conference, while it might not be an official media announcement, is still an announcement of sorts, especially among the tiny minority that actually nerds on internet browsers... A media savvy company like apple knows how to balance official and unofficial announcements just like video game manufacturers and the white house.
Do you have more examples than that?
He probably could provide more examples but why should he if you're going to pull the same stunt over and over again?
I think it's sufficiently clear that you've got your mind set and that you've shut yourself from all other browsers...which is perfectly fine. Just don't come in here and ask people to do your homework.
Both of these are available as a 3rd party (micro-play?)add-on now,
First, I'm not aware of such add-ons, and second, that's completely off-the-point. When comparing products, you compare what features they come with directly, not what additional features you could have by additng additional products. For what it's worth, I'm typing this with Internet Explorer 7, which also happens to be my default browser while using Windows Vista pre-releases, even though alternatives such as Firefox would work fine; I'm quite okay with using IE. But I'm also apparently more aware of what it doesn't do and does do than you are.
Internet Explorer 7 does not let you extract tabs into their own windows (Safari 3 does).
Internet Explorer 7 does not support search highlighting (Safari 3 does), nor incremental search (Safari 3 and Firefox 1.0 do).
Internet Explorer 7 does not let you resize a text box (Safari 3 does; OmniWeb 5 sort of does by making a new window with the text box, which is a neat alternative implementation).
Internet Explorer 7 does have a phishing filter, but that is about all it has going for it, compared to Firefox 1.5 and Safari 2.0, both of which are out right now and have been for a long time.
Internet Explorer 7 also has a zoom feature, which neither Firefox nor Safari currently implement, although Opera does and has for a long time. However, Opera's and Internet Explorer's zoom is so terribly broken you wouldn't really want to use it anyway unless you absolutely had to.
Well, with the intel chip, I thought it would be somewhat easier to move pc apps to mac,
The CPU architecture has little bearing on that. You can virtualize Windows (Parallels, VMWare), you can run Windows through dual-boot (BootCamp) and you can even run Internet Explorer 6 directly inside Mac OS through API emulation (Wine/CrossOver), but to make an actual Mac app, the effort is about as big or small as it was with PowerPC.
Maybe you're not giving Apple enough credit here. Demonstrating something at an Apple developers' conference, while it might not be an official media announcement, is still an announcement of sorts
That was almost two months ago and is unrelated to the alleged news in the article discussed here. You were implying that the article referred to an announcement of Apple's, which it did not.
He probably could provide more examples but why should he if you're going to pull the same stunt over and over again?
I think it's sufficiently clear that you've got your mind set and that you've shut yourself from all other browsers...which is perfectly fine. Just don't come in here and ask people to do your homework.
I admit that my initial post to this thread was based on a misunderstanding.
I thought this was resolved in post #41 by Chucker. I don't see why you might call it homework. It's just that I've used Safari and I haven't found enough reason to consider it competitive, unless you compare it to IE6, then it's clearly superior.
I'm not shut off from all other browsers, I just want something that's reasonably close to the top of the game. Text shadows isn't enough. The next version seems to have some neat features, but that's a good half a year away. If it offered an accessible extension architecture with a good community around them, then that may be the killer feature for me. I like Firefox mostly for the small, simple third party extensions, not necessarily for the core software by itself. The extensions I've used for Safari were fairly sizable and either didn't do what I wanted, were overly complex or simply blew up for other reasons, one just got into a loop just trying to get into gmail.
If it offered an accessible extension architecture with a good community around them, then that may be the killer feature for me.
While inofficial, InputManager-/SIMBL-based extensions work just fine. PimpMySafari.com.
In the end I switch between Camino (for Gecko testing) and my main browser, Safari. I prefer Safari's CSS and Javascript debuggers too to the Firefox plugins. (see http://webkit.org/blog/?p=41 and http://webkit.org/blog/?p=61 )
Opera - It's nice on my phone, mostly because it doesn't have the desktop interface but that's the only place I'll touch it. Horrible, horrible software.
Just the way you select text in the address bar annoys the hell out of me.
I can't get the behavior to be any different for FF 1.5 or 2.0 compared with Safari 2.0, so I'm not sure what you mean. It's probably long overdue, but there is a spell checker in 2.0. I guess that's not the type of thing I'd notice, I generally don't use spell checkers.
And why is this an article now? These features have been know since the preview was leaked.
I can't get the behavior to be any different for FF 1.5 or 2.0 compared with Safari 2.0, so I'm not sure what you mean.
They seem to have changed it in 1.5. In 1.0 I remember it was like Windows. Now the only thing it does different to Safari is that it doesn't automatically select urls from the drop down if you've already visited them. Much better but still different.
It's not necessarily worse, just different. The Windows way of selecting text annoys me immensely and that is worse not just different.
It's probably long overdue, but there is a spell checker in 2.0. I guess that's not the type of thing I'd notice, I generally don't use spell checkers.
I use them everywhere and expect them everywhere to the point that it annoys me when they aren't. I bet they don't use the system spell checker though and have instead implemented their own, thus ignoring all my corrections from American to English.
You've got that backwards.
And why is this an article now? These features have been know since the preview was leaked.
Because they weren't shown entirely at WWDC so they are news to some people who are not developers or pirates.
It depends on what I'm doing. I perfer windows to tabs in some cases, and tabs in others. For instance, if I'm doing something that requires me to look at multiple windows at the same time, and it's too many to set side-by-side, I'll use windows because I can view them all at once via Expose, then quickly go back to my text field. Although this wouldn't work without Expose... It's easier then constantly switching between tabs and having to find where I left off over and over again.
But for normal browsing, I'll use tabs to save space.
get the "showcase fox" extension for firefox. just like expose for firefox tabs.
Most of what you want is already there and it's pretty easy to use.
Make a folder in the bookmarks or bookmarks toolbar and put bookmarks in it.
sorry, jeff, but most of what he wants is NOT in safari :-(
it is not opening a set of bookmarks that is the issue ... it is CREATING a set of bookmarks in the first place that is the problem.
for some unfathomable reason of gross stupidity, apple has _crippled_ safari from being a useable production platform ...
no one can possibly have time to make a bookmark for each tab individually - this could easily take an hour (including all the time it takes to invoke/close the BM window as well as entering all the tags necessary for spotlight - hello! why doesnt safari have a rich tag editor that utilizes the LSA (latent semantic analysis) engine in os/x?!).
for all practical concerns, the total absense in safari of a credible bookmark manager (actually a collection manager more generally) forces busy knowledge workers into some VERY unattractive choices: either they step down to firefox & lose native mac features such as spotlight support, or else they are punished into using camino where they must suffer bizzare rendering glitches as well as glacial load times for the bookmark window (ie 10-20 minutes! which is a horrendous price to pay when one wants to do something as simple as edit the tags in a bookmark one has just created - or if one wants to re-open a tab one has just closed after book-marking ... a feature which firefox does have BTW: sweet!).
neither is a savory alternative.
all because apple will not commit serious resources to safari (the tab set problem is just at the the top of the list ... and the awkward keyboard commands follows closely behind in terms of unnecessary aggrevation.
=> The Bigger Picture: while apple fritters away its chance to do something truly innovative (like create the first browser for the semantic web), it also ignores the opportunity to improve in the mid-range of browser technology - ie UI languages.
yes, the tab & keyboard assignments (Hello embedded Quicksilver!) are the kind of no-brainers that raise the question of why there isnt a deeper, NIB-based editor which (graphically) exposes all the interface components so that they can be scripted, or keyboarded, or voice-enabled etc) .... but what is striking is that apple has (still!) yet to create a formal UI language despite its many years of developing guidelines & indeed (in many cases) many years of best practice in actually implementing UI's.
When the next generation of quicktime is based on mpeg7 & mpeg21, it will be unavoidable to have a proper scene description language ... which is content-based (and driven by meta-data), but does not extend into a description of the Control Language of the UI.
But why wait until everyone & their uncle has figured out a (standardized) representation for description & for action (hello UML2! it is no co-incidince that Action Semantics for model-driven designs are alien for os/x since apple doesnt support any UML in XCode!) ... apple could start now with (non-content based) scene description languages, at first just for the UI elements themselves. A small but robust UI language would be a great way to introduce the concept of formal Action Semantics to developers because a UI has a constricted set of primitives compared to the the content description itself); the goal here is not just obvious stuff like syntax-directed editors for HOL's, but rather the broader vision of BEHAVIORAL
A genuinely dynamic UI would also allow users to start experiencing the greater ease-of-use that is possible when there is an ADAPTIVE UI rather than a static one ... which is a very tangible differentiator for apple products in an era when Microsoft (finally) has some credible infrastructure to compete against apple ...
(remember folks: just because WINFS may or may not be deep-sixed in Vista/Vienna/etc does NOT by any means entail that microsoft still doesnt have one or two other arrows left in its quiver .... ie dotNet3 is capable of supporting some show-stoppers ... Microsoft was forced to proceed without fully exploiting dotNet3 because of all the delays in Longhorn; but this doesnt mean they will have such impediments in the future ... and it is only one step from a widget language to an affordance-based UI language ... so complacency now at Apple, just when Vista is starting a 5 year run of innovation (yeah, yeah, I know - it sounds like an oxymoron), could prove to be a major mistake when it comes to nexgen interfaces (remember: the REAL challenge is not to create ever more elegant abstractions of the data (the machine) or the information (the apps) - but rather creating useful abstractions of the knowledge ... once again: "It's The Semantics Stupid").
The fact that Quartz in Leopard has resolution independence is only one half of the nexgen UI puzzle ... unless the affordance of a UI can be formally expressed (in a scene description language) then each new apple product (like iphone) or each new mac product (like Safari or Aperture etc) will have to have a laboriously hand-crafted UI, which is concomitantly slower to develop & tougher to test than one that is formally ie DECLARATIVELY specified (ie in a functional language like Haskell - cf http://haskell.readscheme.org/gui.html).
While it would be swell for apple to actually show some real long-range initiative viz a browser for the Semantic Web; or even some mid-range improvements in the UI (that are not one-off and years late, but rather part of a systematic approach to Adaptive, model-based, design such as a NIB-based scene description/interaction language) .... i will gladly trade those halcyon days for something as simple in the here & now as some frick'n tab sets!
when thinking of the woeful feature/performance short-coming of safari, i feel like Oliver in Dickens, coming up to the head table in the cruel & indifferent orphanage, where he boldly asks 'more please'; only to be met with shock & dismay that anyone would dare ask for a sufficient level of sustenance!