Re: [xml-dev] Do you enjoy neighborhoods where every house looks the sam

[John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 7:19 PM, Wendell Piez <wapiez@wendellpiez.com> wrote:

The tool shapes the hand, and
pretty soon I think every data structure is a tree.

By the same token, form liberates.  A political columnist (or blogger) has it easy compared to a columnist with the same deadlines who has to write about "something interesting".  No day passes without its political issues to write about, but having to find a new topic every day to keep a diverse readership interested is no trivial demand.  (I forget who said this.)

Standards are great, except when they're not.

Indeed, the fluidity, ease, and grace of this conversation would be impossible without standards, a dozen of them at least:  TCP/IP, various router procotols, DNS, SMTP, POP and/or IMAP and/or HTTP, RFC 5322 (formerly 822) headers, MIME, Unicode, HTML, and even Standard English.

And even when it is, a schema (most especially
when elevated to the status of a standard in name or in fact) can
quickly become a sacred cow. Which is probably all by itself a good
reason for Simon not to like them.

Sacred cows make the best hamburgers.

 

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