RE: is that a fork in the road?

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

SQL required years and iterations.  UNIX took thousands 
upon thousands of manhours of work and even then, 
spawned multiple incompatible versions and never 
became a usuable technology outside its own priesthood.  
C's inventor required extensible typing 
and inheritance of method and code, so C++, now 
C# because Java hasn't quite lived up to the 
promise of write once run anywhere.  

This isn't matter of not trying to solve the entire problem 
but of understanding the entire problem and 
working toward a complete solution.  That's the 
real lesson of history;  iteration and rework.

XML is one step beyond comma-delimited 
character strings.  That's 20.  Whoopee. 
The 80 is Beyond XML.  Back to the wars.

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

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


-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@textuality.com]
Sent: Friday, March 02, 2001 6:04 PM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: RE: is that a fork in the road?


At 04:01 PM 02/03/01 -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>Success?  Everyone can use <...  ...="..." />. 
>Whoopee!  Try to connect the dots and see 
>what happens.  That minimal victory bites.

Whoopee indeed, based on what seems to be happening
out there.  The lesson here is the same as the one
taught by the Web itself, by the C and Java 
languages, by SQL, by the Unix system call interface, 
in fact from virtually every successful world-changing
technology deployment: don't try to solve the whole
problem.

Or to put it in Len's terms, minimal victories are just 
fine, because they're the ones you can actually get.

It dawns on me that I've now probably said this enough
times...  -Tim "80-20" Bray