One that comes to my mind is OpenDoc, a cool and exciting proposal for a way to make editable generic computer documents that were not application constrained. The idea was to make documents a cross-platform, operating system level responsibility and what we today think of as applications would instead be embedded viewers/editors that could be used when putting different types of “objects” in documents.
We did eventually get something like it: Google Docs, Word, and even web pages generally have the ability to embed all kinds of different other documents, and sometimes there is viewing/editing support within the document (you can see images, embed editable spreadsheets, embed editable diagrams, etc.), but with more vendor lock-in and missing the spirit of vendor openness OpenDoc intended.
In the same vein as OpenDoc, XMPP and RSS both come to mind. While they “saw the light of day”, they never seemed to reach the threshold of popularity necessary for long-term survival, and they’re not well supported any more. I would argue that they’re both good examples of “left-behind” tech.
One that comes to my mind is OpenDoc, a cool and exciting proposal for a way to make editable generic computer documents that were not application constrained. The idea was to make documents a cross-platform, operating system level responsibility and what we today think of as applications would instead be embedded viewers/editors that could be used when putting different types of “objects” in documents.
We did eventually get something like it: Google Docs, Word, and even web pages generally have the ability to embed all kinds of different other documents, and sometimes there is viewing/editing support within the document (you can see images, embed editable spreadsheets, embed editable diagrams, etc.), but with more vendor lock-in and missing the spirit of vendor openness OpenDoc intended.
In the same vein as OpenDoc, XMPP and RSS both come to mind. While they “saw the light of day”, they never seemed to reach the threshold of popularity necessary for long-term survival, and they’re not well supported any more. I would argue that they’re both good examples of “left-behind” tech.