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RE: XML, hypertext

• To: 'Jelks Cabaniss' <jelks@j...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: XML, hypertext
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 09:41:55 -0500

Steve knows his stuff and has his agendas too. 
Don't we all?

We'll never get rid of HTMLBasic.  It's here to stay, 
so those who have dreams or illusions of a seamless 
elegant web should look around at their neighborhood 
and unless they live in a planned neighborhood with 
walls, gates, and guards, understand that the web 
sprawls for exactly the same reasons.  People like it.

Sprawl is inconvenient and a little costly, but that 
is the way freedom works if it is initiative-based 
instead of RFP-based.  America has never cleaned 
up after the Manhattan Project.   Letting a General 
with an unlimited budget fund everything a group 
of theoretical physicists propose and design has 
a way of getting the job done but leaving a mess 
for future generations.

I believe the operative phrase these days is, 
"Deal with it."

len

From: Jelks Cabaniss [mailto:jelks@j...]

Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
 
...
> http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/newcombGroves19990908.html

Particularly relevant in the above (one might profitably substitute "the
DOM" with some other, uh, "technologies"):

<snip>
    I hope we're not facing a future in which the semantics of
    certain chosen vocabularies will be directly supported by
    future versions of the DOM.  Such support should "plug into"
    (and be unpluggable from) the DOM.  No vocabulary-specific
    support should become a required feature of all DOM
    implementations.  For example, making XLink a vocabulary is
    fine; making the DOM able to support XLink but no other
    linking vocabularies would be the start of a long nightmare
    with a bad ending.  To do that would significantly reduce
    the freedom of industries to design their own information
    architectures, and to evolve them according to their own
    perceived needs.  It would also destroy the DOM, which must
    stay simple in order to survive.  No API can do everything
    for everybody, and once you start putting support for DTD-
    specific (or namespace-specific) semantics into the DOM,
    where do you stop?  I've watched a couple of systems bloat
    uncontrollably and meet their demise in similar ways, and
    the stage is perfectly set for the same thing to happen to
    the DOM.
</snip>

Pretty prescient in 1999.  

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