RE: Who knows? (was RE:??? (was RE: A Simple Guy ...))

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

The trick for that Captain was not to go 
too fast too north at that time of the 
year.  Even then, it might have worked 
if the two kids in the clinch on the deck 
hadn't distracted the lookouts in the 
crow's nest:  hmm, or was that last bit history 
distorted in the retelling?  

This ain't Academia vs RealMen or 
Lawyers vs RealMen, or us vs them 
or anything else.  It is knowing 
how to spec based on a requirement 
that makes more sense than the kind 
I see these days from some working groups. 
It is picking a technology based on 
the current conditions of the technical 
environment: the affordable solution.  The ability 
to do that exists if you can get through the
politics and find a customer with money.

Survivors of the Titanic got right 
back on the next ship.  One maid/nurse 
even served on the two sister 
ships that sank and she lived to a ripe old 
age.  Knowing how to swim is really 
useful.   So were the new standards for 
lifeboats and passenger capacity.

The northwest passage was successfully 
navigated by the USS Nautilus in the 
1950s.  A route is found by picking 
the right technology when it becomes 
available.  The problem stayed the same.

The XML technologies of 
the early 90s were fought by the supporters 
of CGM, FOSI, PostScript, scrollers, 
and so on.  When the market was right 
and the need was obvious to enough 
people, it succeeded.  It wasn't simplicity, 
it wasn't that "dozen people", the 
W3C, the shining moment of clarity, 
or the other revisions of history. 
It was cheap memory, cheap processors, 
and cache.  The rest was just hacking 
away the bits they didn't need anymore.

So the Captain should also choose 
the time of year.  The Learned Ones 
survive that way or go down with the 
ship.  You don't have to predict the 
future.  You may get that wrong.  You 
have to read the freakin' RFPs and 
count.  Simple, right?  It would be 
if there were RFPs for W3C tech.

So what's the problem?  Get that right 
then pick the technology.

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

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


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Champion [mailto:mike.champion@softwareag-usa.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2001 10:29 AM
To: xml-dev
Subject: Re: Who knows? (was RE:??? (was RE: A Simple Guy ...))


-----Original Message-----
From: Kimbro Staken [mailto:kstaken@dbxmlgroup.com]
>> A perfect elegant masterpiece of academic
>> ingenuity that solves everybody's problems and insures interoperability
>> at any possible level is in actuality not perfect at all if it isn't
>> widely implemented AND deployed in the real world.

Len Bullard replied:
> "Once around the wheelhouse, twice
> around the wheelhouse. Then he
> saw that big 'berg and said, 'I'm
> gonna move you...'"
>
> Choose the captain and the route wisely.

That's the crux of the problem here.  As David Megginson said yesterday, the
best project managers are 90% right about predictions a month in advance ...
which means that they're about 50% right about predictions six months in
advance ... which means that even the wisest captains don't have a clue how
to "wisely" choose a route for a journey that will take more than a year.

Internet techologies are in the Age of Discovery, not the Age of
Enlightenment. Send out many different explorers, using different types of
ships, navigation methods, means of keeping the crew healthy, etc.  Learn
from those who make it back, and forget those who don't.  The Learned Ones
may produce "elegant masterpieces of academic ingenuity" that assert there
is a Northwest Passage from Europe to Asia and that bloodletting cures
scurvy, but pay more attention to the tales of the survivors.

Standards for Navigation are clearly a "good thing", but should codify the
experience of the explorers, not the theories of the Learned Ones.  XML 1.0
codifies the experiences of the SGML survivors, XSLT codified the experience
of the DSSSL survivors. Some of the later XML specs sound more like academic
treatises on "phlebotomy" [1] than survivor's tales.