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It more or less points out where community development
based on consensus, although an attractive idea,
goes off the rails over time. The accretion of
small variations in properties tends towards
an arabesque, and this is just another example
of how simple things become obscure even if
composed completely of simpler things when there
are too many pens drawing into the same space.
Eventually someone is brave enough or has the
resources to come up with an alternative, eg,
XAML/Longhorn or something like it. This
shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with the
pre-web/post-web history of hypertext systems
where much of what became GUI originate. I
don't think scaling issues, standards architectures
or even the politics of closed vs open systems
will change that evolution because it is not
driven by technical requirements completely,
but by the rejection of needlessly complicated
means to do simple tasks. In ecosystems, the
environment generally wins. It has the best
imprimatur of all.
len
From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@rbii.com]
On Nov 2, 2004, at 10:12 AM, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> The fun of developing in a system that didn't rely on
> multiple languages, the modal dialogs were modal,
> the statefulness was manageable, the security was
> secure, a stylesheet was applied to a document not
> a form, hyperlinks were old fashioned and only
> used for TOCs and inverted indexes in the composition
> engine, complexity was used to describe income
> tax forms, we could buy a system from a vendor
> that supported it for ten years, if you could master
> the main function, the rest was easy, SQL was a novel
> but useful toy, a path expression didn't look like
> it derived its syntax from subway grafitti...
Ahhh. The good old days.
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