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Steve knows his stuff and has his agendas too.
Don't we all?
We'll never get rid of HTMLBasic. It's here to stay,
so those who have dreams or illusions of a seamless
elegant web should look around at their neighborhood
and unless they live in a planned neighborhood with
walls, gates, and guards, understand that the web
sprawls for exactly the same reasons. People like it.
Sprawl is inconvenient and a little costly, but that
is the way freedom works if it is initiative-based
instead of RFP-based. America has never cleaned
up after the Manhattan Project. Letting a General
with an unlimited budget fund everything a group
of theoretical physicists propose and design has
a way of getting the job done but leaving a mess
for future generations.
I believe the operative phrase these days is,
"Deal with it."
len
From: Jelks Cabaniss [mailto:jelks@jelks.nu]
Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
...
> http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/newcombGroves19990908.html
Particularly relevant in the above (one might profitably substitute "the
DOM" with some other, uh, "technologies"):
<snip>
I hope we're not facing a future in which the semantics of
certain chosen vocabularies will be directly supported by
future versions of the DOM. Such support should "plug into"
(and be unpluggable from) the DOM. No vocabulary-specific
support should become a required feature of all DOM
implementations. For example, making XLink a vocabulary is
fine; making the DOM able to support XLink but no other
linking vocabularies would be the start of a long nightmare
with a bad ending. To do that would significantly reduce
the freedom of industries to design their own information
architectures, and to evolve them according to their own
perceived needs. It would also destroy the DOM, which must
stay simple in order to survive. No API can do everything
for everybody, and once you start putting support for DTD-
specific (or namespace-specific) semantics into the DOM,
where do you stop? I've watched a couple of systems bloat
uncontrollably and meet their demise in similar ways, and
the stage is perfectly set for the same thing to happen to
the DOM.
</snip>
Pretty prescient in 1999.
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