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Re: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You

• To: Mike Champion <mc@x...>, XML Dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 11:43:58 -0700
• References: <HE1XQODQIC4ZNKMJ65TUGCVQHFHG.3d8759e2@MChamp>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

Mike Champion wrote:
> 9/17/2002 11:06:17 AM, Paul Prescod <paul@p...> wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
> Not having known TimBL in 1989, I defer to Paul's characterization of
> him as an "architecture astronaut."  In 20/20 hindsight, it seems easy
> to see HTTP as an incremental modification of FTP, URLs as 
> DNS+filesystem, and HTML as a trivial SGML DTD.  I'm sure it didn't
> seem so cut and dried at CERN!  

Right, the only glue you needed to integrate FTP, DNS+filesystem, HTML 
and the other little bits was an architecture.

> ...  Still, I guess I don't put "the
> original Web" in quite the same category as LISP and WIMP, since
> TimBL was standing on the shoulders of a pretty large giant (or a large
> stack of dwarves!) by 1989 ...  

That's always true. LISP was a language built around Church's Lambda 
Calculus. I'm sure WIMP had predecessors too. It is precisely the job of 
the architect to take existing components and combine them into 
something new. Probably if an architect has to invent too much he is 
"ahead of his time" and will have trouble getting the product out the 
door. The canonical example is usually Xanadu.

  Paul Prescod

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    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

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