UniversalCanvas - Raymond Yee's Wiki

From JonUdell's The Universal Canvas:

The environment in which such things are possible is one that Microsoft, in its marketing literature, calls "the universal canvas." I've highlighted aspects of this vision in columns on MathML and SVG. My argument is that universal representation of data in XML is as important as universal representation of web-services APIs in XML, and for the same reason: stuff needs to flow. In the case of web services, flow is a network effect that happens when services can trivially interconnect. If XML-RPC and SOAP are succeeding, it's because they reduce barriers to flow more effectively than CORBA/IIOP or DCOM have done. It should be the same with applications. We want the network effect that happens when I can trivially connect a calculation, a table, an image, and a description -- from different sources -- and then share the results. The web can achieve this effect, but not easily. Excel, Word, and Acrobat, built to achieve different goals, are the wrong tools for this job -- overkill on features, weak on integration. The web's own writing tool, the HTML TEXTAREA widget, is conversely well-integrated (with the web) but hopelessly inadequate in terms of features. What we've always needed, and what we still need, is the universal canvas -- a surface on which we view, but also create and edit, words and tables and charts and pictures.

I've said on a number of times that TomPhelps' MultivalentBrowser is the closest single thing I've seen to fulfilling the universal canvas dream.