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   RE: RE: [xml-dev] Painful USA Today article (was RE: [xml-dev] ANN: REST

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On Wed, 2002-05-22 at 11:09, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> We violently agree except that to push back against the 
> requirements of customers is to ensure that there are 
> no real applications for that technologically coherent 
> technology.  That is how they end up buying big garbanzo 
> bean filled salads of toolkits instead of being able 
> to get modular pipelined applications.

To the extent that customers want good technology, this makes sense.  To
the extent that customers buy technology by wandering through a
checkbox-list of features, it doesn't work.  Telling customers "no,
that's bad for you" is something that needs to happen more often.

> In my experience, having an application is the best 
> way to trim out the fat of the technology.  For it 
> to be ubiquitous, it has to solve a problem everyone 
> has.

I wish it was that simple.  An application is good for chopping down
technologies to fit that application, but the prospect of multiple
applications leads to feature creep - all those use cases must be
answered.  

XML 1.0 did a wonderful job of saying "these are our goals" rather than
"these are our use cases", and that actually worked.  Now that the use
cases are back on the scene with claims of "our customers want to do
XYZ", the features are piling on.

I'm not content with selling the world an enormous mash of features and
possible combinations of features and leaving it to developers of
particular applications to sort out which parts are valuable and which
are trash.
 
-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com





 

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