• From: Len Bullard <len.bullard@u...>
• To: Michael Kay <mike@s...>, Tim.Bray@S..., abcoatesecure-xmldev@y...
• Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 08:54:10 -0500

Precisely.  The relationship to the complexity (roughly, the unit distance
(in some unit) of the instructions required to duplicate (Kolmogorov
complexity I think) over the distribution of the technology (reach and
scope) makes it hard to project which technologies survive.   And yes, the
value of the content (being local if expansive) has less effect than we want
to believe even if legislated or mandated.

For example, I worked on the River of Life (VRML/X3D) on and off for ten
years.  Most of that was smooth with each succeeding implementation handling
the information gracefully.  As I neared the end of this phase, I had to
narrow the browsers targeted to one (BS Contact) given it has the best
memory management for the numbers of objects being handled in real-time.
Note this isn't a MU world, just a stand-alone free roamer with
fixed-sequences for some of the objects.  Even though other browsers have
certified compliance, they literally fall down given high complexity worlds.
That may improve and giving them a content shake test is one way to provide
public incentives.  But...

Somewhere between last fall and now, Bit Management dropped support for gif
animation.  This format is considered obsolete although there is quite a bit
of it out there.  At that point, I can no longer rely on the company site to
send users to for a browser and have to archive the version that does work.
It is a demo with floating logo, and the tradeoff will now be irritation
with the product to see the content.   Now the content competes AGAINST the
product for distribution primacy.

That beat of content complexity against technical capability over perceived
support advantages for format is the three-body problem of technical
stability and predictability.

len


From: Michael Kay [mailto:mike@s...] 
 
> I.e., whatever it is we call a "computer" in 2027 will probably run 
> libxml2 and Jing just fine.  -T

Probably not "out-of-the-box", I suspect, unless they have been continually
maintained in the interim. For example, Java in the last year or two has
made incompatible changes such as introducing the "enum" keyword, changing
the output format of BigDecimal.toString(), and adding methods to the DOM
interfaces, all of which have required changes to Saxon. When you accumulate
such changes over 20 years they become quite significant, especially as it
becomes difficult to identify when the change was made and to locate
documentation. You could try to go back to an earlier version of Java if you
can find it, but that might only work with an old version of the operating
system, which might not have a device driver for whatever it is you now use
for input and output...

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