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I agree in general. ;-)
As I understand it, the web was designed as Paul said
to solve only a few problems and not be the general
purpose solution to either open integrated hypermedia
systems, or to the problems of very large distributed
computing systems. Without a bounded context,
one can't really tell if it is better than another
solution scoped to solve problems in that context,
Without some understanding of other contexts,
one can't make comparisons. Breezy requirements
make for the magic phrases such as "worse is better"
and centralization of authority can also lead
to circularity. It is the Golem problem.
People making that "worse is better" statement
usually are actually arguing for a smaller scope
of work. What may be the case is that "smaller
contexts" are the key to replication through colonization.
Boltzman Outs Ambition Everytime. True of digital
and human reproduction. Don't advertise to
your competitors your intent to obtain authority
over their ecosystem resources. Do it by taking
a niche they don't monitor, then grabbing the
neighboring niche by force, guile, or doing
the job under budget and within schedule.
That is how the web was won.
The web by opening up and sustaining global
communications without regard to historical
borders is better than systems which rely
on centralized switching and routing. But
that is simply the Internet. WASD. And
for that, better is better and it took
years to get that right. How many letters
made it into the first ARPANet communication
before the system crashed? It was a newt,
but it got better. The web is the latest
in the evolution of newts getting better.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
> And one has to deal with the issue that miscommunication
> is also useful and purposeful. One problem of making
> things "easy" with "worse is better" solutions such as
> HTML and HTTP,
I cringe everytime I see "worse is better" referenced, especially when
it's applied to the Web. The Web is better because it was designed to
be better.
"worse is better" is usually used by people who don't see the larger
context in which a system is designed, and don't understand all the
tradeoffs that were made. So they pick on one or two pieces and say
"see, that's clearly worse because it could have been done so much
better this way", without recognizing that doing it that way would have
forced some unacceptable tradeoff to be made elsewhere.
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