[rant] The morning routine. E-mail, check the technology web sites, voice mail, update the fantasy hockey stats, quick trip to the cafeteria. Wait, back-up, hockey stats?

Running a fantasy hockey league is based on the fact that hockey is the first sport I'm not a complete klutz at. This realization has forced me to embrace all things hockey... the league being, perhaps, the pinnacle of my "sickness".

ESPNet has been the stat source of choice for the league for two years now. The web site tends to provide accurate information while embracing most of the gee-whiz HTML features, but this practice may lead the web into disarray.

Recently, the stats for a Florida Panthers -vs- New York Rangers pop up on the screen. I paged down to the individual player stats and noticed some subtle formatting problems. Not serious, just check another game -- same problem. ESPN is by no means infallible, but a problem across multiple pages is odd. On a hunch, I launched Internet Explorer and checked the same page. A-ha. The formatting was perfect. The problem wasn't with the page, the problem was with my browser, Netscape 3.0.

The cause was Microsoft's implementation of cascading style sheets. A nifty feature that showed up in Internet Explorer 3.0 which provides easy control over color and image backgrounds on tables and table cells, whitespace control, and font control. Netscape has yet to support cascading style sheets but currently does a decent job with style sheet pages, but that's today -- tomorrow Netscape will have JavaScript based style sheets and who knows what they'll look like in Internet Explorer.

The metaphor of choice for the web is TV. The signal is your network connection, the TV is your browser. The similarities end there because, as a consumer, you're guaranteed to get the same signal whether you buy JVC or Sony. In web terms, you can't currently be sure what you see is what you're supposed to because innovation has taken precedence over compatibility.

[sift this] Playing second fiddle to Marimba's Castanet transmitter technology is the Java application development environment, Bongo.

Bongo's closest relative must be Visual Basic. A simple form editor designed to make it easy to piece together familiar widgets into a full-blown application, but the language isn't Basic... it's Java. The examples included with the Beta are simple and easy to understand, but viewed against the some of the existing channels, one wonders about the hoops that need jumping before a useful application can be implemented.

Bongo still moves in the right direction. The help is all HTML and lives at Marimba which means your documentation is always up to date. The language is Java so you're essentially designing applications for multiple platforms. Plugging into Marimba's transmitter concept provides you with extremely cheap software distribution. It's almost enough to convince me to play around with Bongo more even though it's slugging on my high-end Pentium.

Almost.

Every web application that I've designed involves the manipulation of data, usually from some type of SQL database. The lack of a data access widget makes Bongo an interesting way to toy with Java, but fails to convince me to write for the platform.