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Any time a technology is in use for ten or twenty
years, standardized, and then looked at for a different
environment of application, the 80/20 rule is what
engineers apply to get it up and running in that
new environment. That only makes sense.
It doesn't revise history. Unless we keep that
history as clean as can be managed, the character
of an effort degrades. Don't teach them to steal
by example, or lie to garner fame or money. It
isn't that that won't work; it is that the results
are degrading for the team. Markup has a long
history full of important people whose individual
character, whose individual goals, and whose individual
contributions made it a success. That is teamwork,
even when they don't realize they are on the same team.
I'm sitting here trying to think of a technology that
"didn't matter". I can't think of one. Every one of
them in some way contributed. They varied by their
monetary success and eventual ubiquity. If that is
what this is about, consider that SGML is still being
used, as Rick Jeliffe noted, by major publishing houses
to do the job for which it was originally designed.
Maybe to those businesses, the web doesn't matter; or if
it does, they see XML for what it is: a subset of SGML
designed to work On The Web.
len
From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@xegesis.org]
3/15/2002 5:01:49 PM, "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com> wrote:
>If we had to invent XML from scratch, would it
>have mattered? If HTML had been invented from
>scratch, would it have succeeded?
Well, I had a similar reaction the first time I read the
presentation. Then I turned it around: If it weren't for
HTML and XML, no one (outside of our tiny little world
circa 1996) would argue that SGML "mattered."
Other things on the list may not have mattered in their
original incarnation -- let's say that "4GL" didn't matter,
but they proved the concept that you don't need to be a
computer scientist to write useful programs, which led
to Visual Basic (etc.) which clearly do matter. So,
perhaps it makes sense think about what it took to make
these matter ... and I for one would argue that the
80:20 rule was important in making SGML matter in the
form of HTML and XML, making 4GL matter in the form of VB,etc.
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