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RE: Imprimaturs - W3C and ISO

• To: 'Gavin Thomas Nicol' <gtn@r...>, XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Imprimaturs - W3C and ISO
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>
• Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2004 08:12:29 -0600

It more or less points out where community development 
based on consensus, although an attractive idea, 
goes off the rails over time.  The accretion of 
small variations in properties tends towards 
an arabesque, and this is just another example 
of how simple things become obscure even if 
composed completely of simpler things when there 
are too many pens drawing into the same space.

Eventually someone is brave enough or has the 
resources to come up with an alternative, eg, 
XAML/Longhorn or something like it.   This 
shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with the 
pre-web/post-web history of hypertext systems 
where much of what became GUI originate.  I 
don't think scaling issues, standards architectures 
or even the politics of closed vs open systems 
will change that evolution because it is not 
driven by technical requirements completely, 
but by the rejection of needlessly complicated 
means to do simple tasks.  In ecosystems, the 
environment generally wins.   It has the best 
imprimatur of all.

len


From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@r...]

On Nov 2, 2004, at 10:12 AM, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

> The fun of developing in a system that didn't rely on
> multiple languages, the modal dialogs were modal,
> the statefulness was manageable, the security was
> secure, a stylesheet was applied to a document not
> a form, hyperlinks were old fashioned and only
> used for TOCs and inverted indexes in the composition
> engine, complexity was used to describe income
> tax forms, we could buy a system from a vendor
> that supported it for ten years, if you could master
> the main function, the rest was easy, SQL was a novel
> but useful toy, a path expression didn't look like
> it derived its syntax from subway grafitti...

Ahhh. The good old days.

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