[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@datadirect-technologies.com> wrote:
| At 08:36 PM 5/20/2003 -0700, Paul Prescod wrote:
|> Adam Turoff wrote:
|>> The one thing that *is* clear from Jim Waldo's piece is that premature
|>> standardization, like premature optimization, is an unnecessary evil in
|>> this business.
Because every decision to standardize creates a corresponding burden of
legacy (especially when the wrong thing gets standardized.)
|> Fair enough. But when the standard comes too late, a proprietary ["de
|> facto"] standard may have an unassailable position in the marketplace.
Nothing is forever. Only FUD says otherwise.
| Precisely - this is the main reason that web standards tend to be done
| in advance of widespread deployment. Also, for many web technologies,
| interoperability matters from the beginning.
Interoperability is firstly an attitude, on the part of the developers of
a technology. Either they *want* to cooperate (and thus will accommodate
concerns as they are pointed out) or they don't. If they do, they can
always start small - which is considerably easier - and grow. "Widespread
deployment" is actually a red herring, a buzzwordish preemptive strike
*against* experimentation and innovation. If things are done right, by
the time widespread deployment happens, interop should also be in place.
| Perhaps the W3C could have waited 5 years to standardize HTML, adopting
| whatever form of HTML succeeded in the free market, but that might have
| made it extremely difficult for smaller vendors and would have resulted
| in huge incompatibilities among browsers.
Nonsense. The Mosaic paradigm was firmly entrenched by the end of 1994.
A spec for tag soup could have RFC-ed, and the matter settled. The *lack*
of a formal spec for tag soup (never mind that people wince at the idea)
has been the root cause of so much angst ever since.
|
