Mark Baker responded to yesterday's post with kind words. I'd seen Mark's posts on the FoRK mailing list, which I've been a lurker on for a long time.

He also posted some clarifications:

I don't dispute that the browser provides a relatively weak form of compound document framework when compared to OpenDoc and CommonPoint, but my emphasis at the time was in studying the architecture of the system to see if it prevented richer frameworks from being built by extension.

I think we're in vigorous agreemennt here. When I wrote the post, I had already accepted the notion of a universal front end, and was just trying to bring the various components into today's setting. As far as the compound document part of it goes, I think that systems like the ones that Mark identified, Dashboard and Spring would be easier to do an even more powerful, if we had a CDF that they could use. I'm not sure what the primorial but extensible OpenDoc is. I think that maybe Mark means the primordial but extensible universal front end. I know that we're making progress slowly, but it kills me to know that somewhere on a tape inside Apple and HP the CommonPoint and OpenDoc sources are slowly demagnetizing. Especially since I spent a fair amount of time evangelizing them, and also developing them. If IBM *really* wanted to help Linux, they'd give us the sources (and patent licenses) to these two products and let us rebuild them atop Linux and Mono.