"Steven R. Newcomb" wrote:
> If A and B haven't chosen to cooperate (or, more
> accurately, if they don't both happen to use (any of)
> the same base architecture(s), for whatever reason),
> AFs have nothing to offer.
Ah, this was never clear to me.
> The act of cooperating can have many benefits in
> addition to the benefit of reliable information
> interchange, while retaining local control of the
> details. AFs just provide a tangible, workable goal
> for cooperative efforts that use syntax as the basis of
> cooperation. That's not an insignificant thing.
In other words, AFs present a nice technical solution to the following
political problems:
1) We agree on most stuff, but you want child A (which I don't care
about) and I want child B (which you don't care about).
2) We can't agree on naming (which, as anybody knows, is what people
spend 2/3 of their time arguing about).
You're right, that's not insignificant.
-- Ron
So, basically, the companies did agree on a vocabulary and its form, but
got
