Reports of the demise of the IEEE Windowing Committee 1201.1 turn out to be exaggerated (CI No 1,499). True, pulling the conversation level above petty bickering over Motif versus Open Look has been a long haul. True, even chairman Sunil Metha would characterise the tenor of things as beleaguered and despairing. And true, the blow it struck for a single windowing environment at its June meeting may not stand. But it is still in business. Committee members who voted in June to use little Colorado-based XVT’s technology as the group’s base line document for a virtual graphical user interface applications programming interface that would support both Open Look and Motif, are now having second thoughts. They want to look further afield to make sure they’ve covered everything. Oracle has made a presentation but won’t submit what it’s got publicly. Sybase and SAS may have something but they’re not really talking. The committee hopes to look at technologies from at least the UK’s System Strategies and little firm amusingly called Windex perhaps at its next meeting, set for October 16 to 19 in Seattle.
