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- From: Rick JELLIFFE <ricko@geotempo.com>
- To: Dave Winer <dave@userland.com>
- Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 14:18:22 +0800
> Dave Winer wrote:
>
> Please read this essay, written by Joel Spolsky:
>
> http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$133
>
> "If you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen.
> Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create
> these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe
> that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all."
>
> This is what I was trying to say to anyone who would listen at WWW9.
> (And on the Syndication mail list, and everywhere XML comes up.)
The rest of Spolsky's article is about vaporware and FUD, not
over-abstraction. That paragraph is an odd blip.
Is he really saying that the idea of messages is an over-abstraction?
This is pretty strange: packets are not an over-abstraction, JavaBeans
are not an over-abstrction, why should XML messages be an
over-abstraction necessarily?
Criticizing a general, non-technical marketing blurb for being vague is
futile. The pupose of those white-papers is so that barely-technical
decision-makers outside MS feel confident that MS has a good plan and
they are leading not reacting. It is like Lousiana Governor Huey Long's
last compaign slogan "Vote for me, I'm not crazy". I have not read a
"white-paper" from a large corporatoin that was not similarly
insubstantial: they are not written for us.
Rick Jelliffe
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