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On 7/6/06, Bullard, Claude L (Len) <len.bullard@i...> wrote: The damming thing is, that is what the web does, not best or > worst, but simply does at all. Ok Len, the best technologies don't win, the winning technologies win. Worse is better because that is all it > is capable of. I'm prompted to respond because the "worse is better" meme irritates the heck out of me. Damnit the meme meme (or maybe just Richard Dawkins) irritates the heck out of me. There's no doubt Darwinian natural selection applies to critters, ideas, technologies. But the environments for each vary widely. Understatement. XML Schema and Relax NG maybe are examples of winner and better. But the notion of winning implies a time of judgement - is the Web done yet? At this point in time there are certainly places where XML Schema looks a hobbled horse (e.g. Atom) and even places where one might wonder whether Relax NG might be up to another lap (e.g. microformats). Conversely there are places where each seems fittest for the job. But the *general* issues and applicability of such things only seems to happen as some kind of post factum lazy evaluation. Look back in LX anger. Perhaps this suggests there's something inherently flawed about current notions of schema languages. Does syntax validation really offer much for the vast majority of comms on the Web? Sure, I want my bank interactions to fail on errors. (Truth be known I'm probably in the Draconian/anal datahead camp. But I don't see a conflict between that and pragmatism). But I only visit the bank once every few weeks, I'm on the Web most hours of the day. There's pretty obvious value in tight schemas in most *local* contexts, docs or data. But go big distributed, how important is their role? I dunno, probably most folks around here would have anticipated the shift in popularity towards Turtle/N3 syntax from RDF/XML, had the former been on the racing card. RDF schemas still works with that, but offers no real notion of validity (unless you bring in DL consistency, but that's another story). But what of JSON? Dark horse (to cliche out the metaphor). We live and learn. Hobby horse de jour - Atom is a bugfix on the first-fence pileup that is "simple" RSS. But neither would have been necessary had a little more time been spent around metadata parts of HTML. Poll HTML, why not? (c.f. hAtom microformat). Folksy tags also had a chance as HTML keywords. What changed? Not the tech per se, just the enviroment (including technologies, ideas and maybe critters). Maybe on the Web natural selection affects the macro more than the micro. Whatever, my money's on the winner (TBD). Cheers, Danny. -- http://dannyayers.com
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