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I haven't really much to add, subsequent posts cover things rather nicely.
But I must respond to Tom's remarks :
> Where we _do_ have simplicity, we get grass-roots growth and
> invention - and
> here RSS comes in as an example. Like Dare, I bet that most
> people working
> with RSS probably started out with View Source. After all, the specs are
> not that wonderful, so you really have to look at examples.
>
> Do we want more grass-roots growth, and the involvement of large
> numbers of
> people with little training or background? Give them View Source and
> Simplicity!
It was in the context of RSS that I started having my doubts about "View
Source". The keyword for the Userland RSS specs (culminating in RSS 2.0) was
"Simple". One of the big justifications for this was, you guessed, "View
Source".
On the other hand the RSS 1.0 (RDF) syntax was seen as overly difficult, and
not really amenable to the "View Source" approach. A lot of this was FUD,
the difference isn't really that great, but the point remained : simple
means "View Source"-able. No matter what the RDF lobby said about the
benefits of extensibility, Semantic Web, blah di blah, a lot of people chose
current simplicity over future utility.
Moving on a little while, and people have been finding that it can be
difficult to extend beyond a narrow domain following the existing specs.
Namespaces can be used (their inclusion was more of a political consession
than a design decision, btw), but there is still nothing there to help
interpret arbitrary elements (unlike in RSS 1.0). But of course there
isn't - it wouldn't be simple enough if there was.
The difficulties mentioned above together with political tensions and one or
two other motivations has led to the Echo project, which is seen by many as
an attempt to start with a clean slate.
I'm sure Tom's right about "View Source and Simplicity" being great for
grassroots support, but there's a bit of circular argument in their
attractiveness : it's simple because you can view source; make it simple so
you can view source. (I really don't want to comment on
View-Source-because-the-specs-won't-help).
This is fine until you have a plain-text, human-readable, happy happy joy
joy "View Source" syntax that is simply inadequate to model the domain.
There certainly may be benefits in keeping it simple; but these are probably
overrated if you have to start from scratch again a year or two later.
Cheers,
Danny.
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