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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: ??? (was RE: A simple guy with a simple problem)
 "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote: > > No. Simple is good. Too simple for > safety is bad. Knowing which is which > is the trick. > > DTDs? Schemas? How do you know when > what is simple for you is too simple > for the next guy? How do you know > that what Henry proposes isn't precisely > what is needed for that guy to get > his job done? We can't treat XML > spec work as an XP programming > exercise. There isn't enough > room in front of the screen for > everyone involved to sit down and > write the unit tests. Perhaps this is exactly what is needed in XML spec work. Within a single company you can have applications of a significant level of complexity. However, as soon as you get to the edge of that company and look toward a global exchange of data the only thing you will find are protocols that succeed because they are simple and work "good enough". A company might use Microsoft Exchange for their internal email with all its nice bells and whistles but as soon as that email needs to leave the company, bang you're back to SMTP. HTTP, SMTP, NNTP, FTP, HTML, POP, DNS all heavily deployed, widely interoperable and to most technical people pretty simple. They're also all heavily, heavily flawed in one way or another. So what I say, they also work very well for a very large set of problems. The development model for all of them while definitely not "true" XP was certainly far closer to XP then to any top down methodology. All the developers of these things cared about was getting something that works for what they needed at the time and then incrementally improving it from there. Minimal victory just like XP. Funny how they are still the specifications that the Internet is based on. What happens to the more comprehensive, technically elegant solutions? In case after case after case they generate big, unwieldy specs that their inventors think are beautiful but the people who really make things work simply ignore. These people are simply too busy building real applications to take the weeks or months required to understand these monstrosities. The only place these kind of specs can succeed is in specific industries where all the players are large enough to foot the bill. Once you approach the global developer population it simply will not fly. XML is supposed to be a general solution for exchanging data on a large scale. This puts it into the category of global Internet technologies. If XML is to succeed it must be as simple as absolutely possible. In my opinion the W3C almost screwed up with the XML 1.0 spec it self, the only thing that saved them was the option for simple well formed XML. This allowed the majority of people to just ignore most of the cruft they didn't understand and still do some very useful things. This gave XML a minimal victory. Now it is time to build upon it as real world usage dictates using ideas known to actually work in the wild. This is where I think the W3C has run off the tracks. They're building on it alright but I don't know how much of this is really based off of real world usage and ideas. I know I'm just echoing what has been said many times in the past, but the idea that iterative development should not be applied to specification development I find quite disturbing. That model worked quite well to create this globally interoperable network called the Internet. Just because the result isn't perfect doesn't mean that it isn't incredibly useful. 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. > > Daring to do less is still a dare. And it is a dare that the history of the Internet has shown can change the world. Just my opinions of course. :-) -- Kimbro Staken Chief Technology Officer dbXML Group L.L.C http://www.dbxmlgroup.com 
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