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Any time a technology is in use for ten or twenty years, standardized, and then looked at for a different environment of application, the 80/20 rule is what engineers apply to get it up and running in that new environment. That only makes sense. It doesn't revise history. Unless we keep that history as clean as can be managed, the character of an effort degrades. Don't teach them to steal by example, or lie to garner fame or money. It isn't that that won't work; it is that the results are degrading for the team. Markup has a long history full of important people whose individual character, whose individual goals, and whose individual contributions made it a success. That is teamwork, even when they don't realize they are on the same team. I'm sitting here trying to think of a technology that "didn't matter". I can't think of one. Every one of them in some way contributed. They varied by their monetary success and eventual ubiquity. If that is what this is about, consider that SGML is still being used, as Rick Jeliffe noted, by major publishing houses to do the job for which it was originally designed. Maybe to those businesses, the web doesn't matter; or if it does, they see XML for what it is: a subset of SGML designed to work On The Web. len From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@x...] 3/15/2002 5:01:49 PM, "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...> wrote: >If we had to invent XML from scratch, would it >have mattered? If HTML had been invented from >scratch, would it have succeeded? Well, I had a similar reaction the first time I read the presentation. Then I turned it around: If it weren't for HTML and XML, no one (outside of our tiny little world circa 1996) would argue that SGML "mattered." Other things on the list may not have mattered in their original incarnation -- let's say that "4GL" didn't matter, but they proved the concept that you don't need to be a computer scientist to write useful programs, which led to Visual Basic (etc.) which clearly do matter. So, perhaps it makes sense think about what it took to make these matter ... and I for one would argue that the 80:20 rule was important in making SGML matter in the form of HTML and XML, making 4GL matter in the form of VB,etc.
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