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6/10/2002 12:25:47 PM, "Aaron Skonnard" <aarons@develop.com> wrote:
>
>If all major vendors support it, even though some developers think it
>sucks, I'm going to embrace it just like I did with HTTP.
Hmmm ... I embraced HTTP because many interesting resources I wanted to
access were available by HTTP, and they were available by HTTP because
it was simple enough to easily implement and effective enough to be
useful. I think the major vendors embraced it because there were so
many people who wanted to get at those same resources, and because they
could implement it just as easily as everyone else.
The Web didn't happen because the W3C and/or the major vendors made it
happen, it HAPPENED. The major vendors jumped on the bandwagon, and
the W3C was appointed as the steering committee for the bandwagon (which
worked a lot better than fighting over who got to steer).
Thought experiment: what would have happened if some industry consortium
took Ted Nelson seriously a decade ago and promulgated a "standard" that
forbid inline markup and demanded two-way, unbreakable links.
(see http://ted.hyperland.com/buyin.txt). Would we all have embraced it?
I don't think so ... because nobody could have made it actually WORK in
an economical and appealing way.
I see the full complexity of W3C XSD and XQuery as analogous to Ted Nelson's
stuff: imposing them is un-learning the principles -- the 80/20 rule,
"rough consensus and running code", and the network effect -- that made
the Web what it is.
Or to put it differently: Ted Nelson thinks the Web sucks because it
doesn't meet his lofty vision for what a worldwide hypertext network
could be, even though it works. Many developers think W3C XSD sucks
because it is so hard to make work, even though they may admire its
lofty vision for how build solid data exchange networks.
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