xml-dev - Re: Moving beyond disillusionment

["Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>]

More thoughts about this.

I just read Tim Berners-Lee's book, Weaving the Web. There are so many
lessons there, esp about W3C, between the lines. I admire TBL for his work
in defining HTTP, HTML and URIs. Totally. I was working in similar areas,
but I didn't believe in hypertext the way Nelson described it or the way the
web defines it. Ooops. I was wrong about desktop publishing too.;->  So hats
off to TBL, the web is one of the truly remarkable inventions of our
generation. Amazing stuff.

By coincidence, I also did some work on cookies this morning, and in doing
the work I referred back to the original Netscape document about cookies:

http://home.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec.html

Those were the days! Such low-tech easy stuff. No DTDs, schemas, no need to
render cookies in browsers. It just happened. One day there was a spec for
cookies and an implementation and within weeks the cookies were in the HTTP
headers. And look at all that has been accomplished with them. Without them
the web wouldn't be a commercial medium. And I'd argue that without them you
could never do the collaborative web that TBL says is the real vision of the
web (and I totally agree!).

Moral of the story --> let's build more apps, fewer specs.

Dave


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