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[Danny Ayers
> 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.
>
I do not think that we are that far apart. The thing is, no one is really
sure how important the grass-roots, simple factor really is. I tend to
think it is more important for things of wider scope, because to get the
wise scope you have to get a lot of different people to participate. But we
do not know.
We do know that a LOT of web sites got started by people who view-sourced
HTML. We do know - don't we? -that RSS spread in its early days by being
picked up by a lot of people who view-sourced and said "Hey, I can do this
too".
And for that matter, the spread of FOAF in the RDF community is another
grass-roots phenomena whose basis is simple - relatively speaking, anyhow.
What other examples do we have? Counter examples?
And I will confess that every time I have started out with view-sourcing, I
have made a number of wrong assumptions that caused me trouble later on.
But that was OK, because by then I was participating and and had found the
technologies useful, and in the meantime I had gotten useful things
accomplished.
I include Postscript here, BTW, although you need more than just view-source
and it is not exactly simple. But without the ability to view-source on
text-formatted Postscript (i.e., not binary), it would have been a lot
harder for me to do some of the things I did with it.
Cheers,
Tom P
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