[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Because in a cut and paste world, the
examples that are viewed most often become
the patterns by which large and irreversible
trends are created. Web code like any
other signal fed to the Big Amplifier takes
on a life of its own. Intellectuals believe
smart ideas shape the future; they are only
half right. The forces of acceptance
are much more aligned with what one learns
first, then what is accepted by desirable
others visibly and last what
is affordable initially. The web as a marketplace
of ideas and technologies is not as some
would have one believe, a wild wild west
of heroes and villains, the quick and the
dead; it is a street market akin to the
illicit
drug trade where habits become needs,
the witless become chic models for the
naive,
and the smell of slow rot mingles among the
flash of fresh cash and unlined faces
with strangely hazy eyes.
The more choices provided, the fewer the
sales. When faced with uncertainty
(the effect of lots of
hard-to-differentiate choices), most customers leave the
store without purchasing. Mammals
hesitate and any market that is broad
in choice but shallow in sales
evaporates. Eventually, the deepest of the
various pools begins to expand as a
rebranded product with a wave of
new and different merchandising for old and
proven but easily stolen
concepts. Customers are seldom
research analysts and the true origins
of products are not interesting to
them. What we do not vette in design,
every short cut we take in implementation
and certification becomes more
work to be done after the sale.
Customers don't see the process; they
see the wrappers and once purchased, they
defend the omissions and the
bugs because to do otherwise is to admit a
mistake.
Do you care who invented your blue
jeans? Do you buy based on style
or fit? Once the market says a
thing is true and worthwhile, most buy
without question. Fact and quality
only matters to the aware. Code frameworks
are in no way free of the effects of mass
marketing and the web has not
made the slightest bit of difference in
this; it has in fact, amplified it.
Awareness is hard work. Do you have
the time or the money?
Mediocrity is the name of the game, Michael,
because excellence is
too rare to acquire often and too
expensive to sell in mass markets.
len
In some internal discussions of the XLinq http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/future/linq/ project,
I got a very interesting bit of devil's advocacy that went something like
this: "People complain about the DOM, but they
don't embrace alternatives. For all the work that people have done to
provide alternatives such as JDOM, dom4j, XOM, etc. in the Java world, the
typical users and the major Java players still use DOM, warts and
all." I'm not at all convinced this is true, but I don't have any
information at my fingertips to dispute it. Would anyone care to present
facts on one side or the other?
But if this is true, why have cleaner, programming language-friendly
alternatives failed to displace the dear old DOM as the dominant XML
programming model after all these years? I have a few hypotheses (and
these are MY hypotheses, not some FUD from Evil Empire
Central Command, so blame me for any stupidities and the blatant
exaggerations).
- Duh, the network effect. A mediocre standard beats a better
non-standard every time.
- Serious XML developers use XSLT for the heavy
lifting and simply don't worry about APIs any more.
- Sun and IBM haven't included any of the alternatives in their
distributions, so the masses don't even know these things exist, or fear being
stranded in a backwater if they do adopt one.
- Compiled languages are *so* last century, all the interesting XML
processing alternatives are in the dynamic languages world. [E4X | Python | Ruby | PHP | Scala ] rulez, who cares
about any of that stuff anymore?
Thoughts on any of these hypotheses, anyone?
I must emphasize that the XLinq project is very much
on track, has strong management support, and you can expect updated preview
bits / samples / documentation Real Soon Now, so I'm not trying to drum
up external support for any internal battles. Likewise, Microsoft has
absolutely no plans to deprecate XmlDocument (the
DOM vehicle in .NET) ... I'm just doing the usual xml-dev navel
gazing thing :-)
Crush! Zap! Destroy! Junk e-mail trembles before the might of Windows Live(tm)
Mail beta. Windows Live(tm) Mail beta
| 