Re: [xml-dev] What Is XML, or MicroXML?

[John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Stephen Cameron wrote:

In 1991, Sowa first stated his Law of Standards: 

"Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X."^[8]

Well, that's certainly one possible result: standards often do fail.   But for many of these examples, the "result" was no result at all, because they were already de facto standards:

• The introduction of PL/I resulting in COBOL and FORTRAN becoming the de facto standards for scientific and business programming

Already standards, so not an example.

• The introduction of Algol-68 resulting in Pascal becoming the de facto standard for academic programming

This is a good example.  Algol 68 was "extend Algol 60 in every possible way", whereas Pascal was "extend Algol 60 in only the absolutely necessary ways."

• The introduction of the Ada language resulting in C becoming the de facto standard for DoD programming

Ada displaced all the non-C programming languages actually in use, though.  We don't hear much of Jovial any more, for example.  FWIU, military embedded C programming came along quite a while later.

• The introduction of OS/2 resulting in Windows becoming the de facto standard for desktop OS

OS/2 was not any kind of standard, so irrelevant. 

• The introduction of X.400 resulting in SMTP becoming the de facto standard for electronic mail

SMTP was already a de facto standard, so not an example. 

• The introduction of X.500 resulting in LDAP becoming the de facto standard for directory services

LDAP *is* X.500, just on top of a different transport.

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