xml-dev - RE: Microsoft's Role in the XML Community (WAS RE: Important: The SAXC

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Ok, but spell out MIF for me. :-)

Losing a fight has downsides, mostly 
pain and loss of opportunity, but losing a 
cause is a loss of motivation and direction. 
It can also be the start of learning as all 
causes are not worthwhile.  Pick your battles 
and trust both your own judgement and your 
capacity to learn.  Don't play zero sum.

XML shapes behavior because of the way one 
has to go about implementing it.  Few technologies 
I've worked with require as much cooperation 
and negotiation among "the humans" as markup  
does.  That is a strength where the culture 
is fit, that is, demonstrates a proficiency 
at cooperation and negotiation, and a true 
"killer app" where they don't because it 
can quickly put an unfit company out of business. 

This wasn't true of HTML.  It requires practically 
no cooperation, and in fact, rewards that behavior. 
That is why Netscape lost.  When it came time for 
Marc A et al to evolve the web through their product 
architecture, they sat back and derided 
the best deal as proprietary.  Events simply rolled 
over them after that.  They lost sight of their original 
goals of evolving the web, or simply didn't technically 
understand the direction it was taking.

Hopefully, they learned from that experience, but if their 
only resort was litigation, they didn't learn enough. 
Sometimes when fighting the fight, one loses the cause.

Len Bullard
Intergraph Public Safety
clbullar@ingr.com
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/lensongs.ram

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Niclas Olofsson [mailto:gurun@acc.umu.se]

"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote:
> We can't force others to be honest; we can shape them such
> that they are very predictable.

After thinking long and hard about it (which has nothing to do with my
late response) I came to the conclusion that this is the exact reason
why I'm a total MIF fan. MIF doesn't predict possible outcomes, they
simply create them.
The way of standard is as is, and sometimes fighting for the fight is
better than fighting for a cause. After all it's must be better to loose
the fight than to loose a cause. 

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