I have an idea, a proposal, I'd like to discuss with you all. The requirements are simple: Open mind and, if possible, no alergic symptoms to Microsoft's ideas.
Imagine if MorphOS' desktop (Ambient) was just an instance of, say, Voyager web browser, whose's start page is, say "ENV:Desktop/index.html". This web page would have icons representing every object in the computer that the browser might be able to show, including storage volumes (an extension would be needed in Voyager).
Web browsers already have abilities we are asking to conventional desktops: View directories, associate files with applications, etc.
Imagine a Voyager with some little extensions, for it to show local directories content as icon lists. It should be able to examine a directory, and build a (pretty?) HTML document with a link to each one.
Have in mind that those links could include the invocation of the corresponding executable to make use of the files listed, by means of some kind of file identification. File types are also something every browser has built in to some extent, via "MIME types". Voyager even includes a preferences program for that.
For dock bars, one could always have one or more (tailor made?) HTML documents with links to preferred executables. Also, one could make a good use of that "Favourites" or quick links menu.
In some cases, it would be nice if the web browser had an option to hide some of its toolbars and menus. Other options would be to have the browser search first for a default HTML document in every directory, and have it displayed instead of the page generated by the list of files it contains. Also, something like a cache, to avoid generating this kind of documents again and again.
Do you like this idea? Could you post things here that should be hard/impossible to do, to see if there's a way?

is this one possible use for getting MOS on handheld devices like cel phones/PDA's???
I'm not a programmer so I have no clue if this is a good idea or not. I mean in terms of efficient coding. But on these small devices having access via a browser makes sense to me.

Nice idea. But. How many people who daily use Windows with a custom HTML desktop?

I am more willing to have heavy scripting possibilities with ambient than webskining of the desktop.

HTML is slow. HTML is bad. HTML is messy. MOS lacks of a real navigator.

IMO, XML desktop seems more reliable. But all those technology are not readily available.

It will certainly need major rework of ambient to have such functionnality (for example, icon position are stored in the .info, with HTML or XML desktop, it will be stored elsewhere. How to keep coherency between files?).

it would be nice to have XML elsewhere in Mos (skinz, prefs, etc...) but this is not Amiga3.1.

Maybe later? This kind of idea means rework of major OS core component (native XML library, complete redesign of preference file format, etc...).

IMO, it would be nice to make readable and editable all kind of config file with XML.

Lot of work...

Does ambient will feature scripting with Mos1.5?

That would totaly bloat voyager, because engine would have to both be ambient- and web-compatible.

Like in explorer that would be major source of security holes, when malicious webpage might access desktop features.

That would limit ambient, because there are many things that cannot be done even with hacked html.

So result will be slow, limited, unstable and insecure browser and desktop... really sounds like M$ :)