RE: An open plea to the W3C (was Re: XInclude vs SAX vs

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

On 27 Aug 2001 09:06:40 -0500, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> Yet by the mid 90s, optimizers for ADA had been shown 
> to create code that ran as fast and as reliably as C. 
> Just as with SGML and now XML++, sharp people carved 
> off the pieces they needed for their projects and 
> made them work locally.  What is different in our situation 
> is the size of the locale in which these things must 
> work.
> 
> Complexity is manageable given willing resources.  My 
> sense of the web is that anything very complex will 
> soon encounter and very unwilling set of resources, 
> so the first thing to accept is that nothing universal 
> is achievable for very long.

The politics of Ada are worth keeping in mind in this story, however.
The Pentagon poured huge (some would say unseemly) amounts of money into
the project, largely because they had boxed themselves in.  Ada's
current success, as a minor niche player even after that investment,
doesn't seem like a good target to aim for, frankly.

Those resources will not be available for most XML work, nor will the
results of such massive investments necessarily be available to the
general public.

Complexity in this locale is generally poisonous.