[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XML.COM: How I Learned to Love daBomb
Sometimes market does not come from code. Code often comes to market. We are very used to being automated, but it hasn't been that long that when one went to sell a database, they handed back a stack of paper and said "do these." In the business I work for there is still a lot of that. The problem here is staying away from one-off custom development. Find two court systems in two states that handle the same data and know it. It makes things like LegalXML a challenge because as good a design and as simple as it is, there aren't as many takers. When that aha emerges in the market, code drives market. Neither way is right; both are possible and prevalent. It was probably that short period of calling it SGML On the Web. When I first saw SGML, I saw objects, then I looked closer and saw Runoff, and even closer, I saw structs. Every time I peeled back a layer of my ambition, I saw less. Then I started back across the bridge and saw a world of interoperating apps passing documents based on common types. But that was 1986 and it wasn't a very common ambition. They told me it was magic and I needed to get back to work on printing manuals. What do They know? ;-) When writing specs or standards, stay as simple as you can. That is best. When implementing dreams, go your own way and patent as much as you can. In both cases, don't think the region beyond URLs is the edge of the world and that you will fall off if you sail too far. The Rainbow Bridge goes from a frosty dream to Asgard. See if your town still has a library. They have these neat things called "books" there. Like an old horn, they are hard to master but wonderfully deep and resonant if you blow soft and slowly. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Dave Winer [mailto:dave@u...] Aha! I agree. There's an art to building networked apps. First we start off with Hello World, then blogger.newPost, and all kinds of things to get the first layer of wires running. Also custom one-off or private apps, of which there are probably thousands by now. Then, we get commercial products who differentiate themselves by having dual power of being accessible through an easy user interface (Blogger is a good example) and add programmability in some well-conceived, scalable, and clonable way. Then all of a sudden you have a market. At that point experience becomes an important factor. Do you know how to design and document this stuff, and help build a community so people feel safe investing and do you have something that you can make money with so you can hire people to market, explain, write sample code, do quality assurance, answer the phones, and whatever else a company can do to support the market. That's why I've been thinking a lot about platforms lately. I don't think Sun or Microsoft has the guts to really lead this. So I see a bit of an opportunity now. Having been around the block once on the Mac, with virtually all the apps wiring up over a period of five years, I think I have an idea of how this could work, and what things to avoid. BTW, it's interesting that when you look at XML you see SGML, but when I look at it I see AppleScript and Frontier.
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