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On Thursday 24 January 2002 10:04 am, Mike Champion wrote:
> Of course, the flip side of "extreme" design is that you have to be
> willing to refactor the system when it gets *too* kludgy. That's
> the lesson I take from the history of HTTP, HTML, and XML ... it
> wouldn't be here if the participants had taken the time to design
> the Right Thing.
This is the point I was making. I heard from Paul, and others that we
have to go mainstream, and use mainstream technology (ie. HTTP). I
think people place far to much value in "the market" as it exists.
In XML there was "The Desperate Perl Hacker", in the DOM "The
Desperate VB Programmer" and "The Hoards of Existing Users", in HTTP
there was "Existing Practise"... all used to justify obviously, and
admitted poor design. In most cases, these were phantoms and became
largely irrelevant.
I used to give talks about the cost of XML in terms of a chaos theory
of information (information assets tending to degrade over time). Part
of that pointed out that it's usually better to spend many small
amounts of time fixing things to keep them intact, rather than doing
mass-fixups. Same thing applies to software I think.
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