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The trick for that Captain was not to go too fast too north at that time of the year. Even then, it might have worked if the two kids in the clinch on the deck hadn't distracted the lookouts in the crow's nest: hmm, or was that last bit history distorted in the retelling? This ain't Academia vs RealMen or Lawyers vs RealMen, or us vs them or anything else. It is knowing how to spec based on a requirement that makes more sense than the kind I see these days from some working groups. It is picking a technology based on the current conditions of the technical environment: the affordable solution. The ability to do that exists if you can get through the politics and find a customer with money. Survivors of the Titanic got right back on the next ship. One maid/nurse even served on the two sister ships that sank and she lived to a ripe old age. Knowing how to swim is really useful. So were the new standards for lifeboats and passenger capacity. The northwest passage was successfully navigated by the USS Nautilus in the 1950s. A route is found by picking the right technology when it becomes available. The problem stayed the same. The XML technologies of the early 90s were fought by the supporters of CGM, FOSI, PostScript, scrollers, and so on. When the market was right and the need was obvious to enough people, it succeeded. It wasn't simplicity, it wasn't that "dozen people", the W3C, the shining moment of clarity, or the other revisions of history. It was cheap memory, cheap processors, and cache. The rest was just hacking away the bits they didn't need anymore. So the Captain should also choose the time of year. The Learned Ones survive that way or go down with the ship. You don't have to predict the future. You may get that wrong. You have to read the freakin' RFPs and count. Simple, right? It would be if there were RFPs for W3C tech. So what's the problem? Get that right then pick the technology. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Michael Champion [mailto:mike.champion@s...] Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2001 10:29 AM To: xml-dev Subject: Re: Who knows? (was RE:??? (was RE: A Simple Guy ...)) -----Original Message----- From: Kimbro Staken [mailto:kstaken@d...] >> A perfect elegant masterpiece of academic >> ingenuity that solves everybody's problems and insures interoperability >> at any possible level is in actuality not perfect at all if it isn't >> widely implemented AND deployed in the real world. Len Bullard replied: > "Once around the wheelhouse, twice > around the wheelhouse. Then he > saw that big 'berg and said, 'I'm > gonna move you...'" > > Choose the captain and the route wisely. That's the crux of the problem here. As David Megginson said yesterday, the best project managers are 90% right about predictions a month in advance ... which means that they're about 50% right about predictions six months in advance ... which means that even the wisest captains don't have a clue how to "wisely" choose a route for a journey that will take more than a year. Internet techologies are in the Age of Discovery, not the Age of Enlightenment. Send out many different explorers, using different types of ships, navigation methods, means of keeping the crew healthy, etc. Learn from those who make it back, and forget those who don't. The Learned Ones may produce "elegant masterpieces of academic ingenuity" that assert there is a Northwest Passage from Europe to Asia and that bloodletting cures scurvy, but pay more attention to the tales of the survivors. Standards for Navigation are clearly a "good thing", but should codify the experience of the explorers, not the theories of the Learned Ones. XML 1.0 codifies the experiences of the SGML survivors, XSLT codified the experience of the DSSSL survivors. Some of the later XML specs sound more like academic treatises on "phlebotomy" [1] than survivor's tales.
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