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At 01:06 PM 3/18/2002 -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: >Except in hindsight. Everyone is an expert at that. >XML was designed "in hindsight". > >Hindsight matters. There's a lot of truth to that. Everyone knows about Occam's Razor, and most designers say simplicity, conceptual integrity, etc. are important to them. Still, most of our initial designs are more complex than we would like. If we're lucky, our colleagues point out potential simplifications. More likely, they point out all the important cases that our initial solution did not cover. A good designer then goes back to the drawing board, looking for a solution general enough to cover these cases without a bunch of special casing, using hindsight as a tool for knowing what to throw out (grin!). One set of technologies that matter are the break-through technologies that show how something new can be done. These generally have warts, but they show the way. Ten years later, we may want to use something else. Another set of technologies that matter are less brilliant, simple reworkings of the original ideas. XML was not creative or original. Neither was Java, really. Both are excellent examples of hindsight in action. Jonathan
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