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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Expertise and Innovation - was Re: Non-Borg serv
 Killer content would be better but again, look at the top ten search terms and despair the rule by power law. As to expertise and innovation, I remember the old saying that "One knows God loves fools because he made so many of them." Innovations from experts are everywhere but no one gives them much press. When the average idiot makes good on an idea, that's a great news day because no one bets on an idiot until the idea is obvious. It isn't 80/20ness; it isn't implementation; it isn't the source or the destination: it is the obviousness. Simple is the hardest work we do. Musicians know it and probably most artists; less is more. But you can't do less until you have done too much. Most of my time in the studio is spent throwing away parts until I have only the ones I can't afford to throw away. When the test audience says, "very nice but obvious", I'm done. The rare case is the untrained amateur songwriter who copies a chord progression and has a hit. Quick, how many hit songs have the same chord progression as "Happy Birthday"? (For the literate: I V I V I IV iv I V I) As I said, the average idiot can be successful and there are lots of them. I won't bet on one until I hear the song. A hit is well.... obvious. The question is if a success will keep on being successful. Beethoven was the pop art of his day. Today he is a museum piece or at least, playing his work at a club will get me fired. Jazz did well when the blues was too black. Today? Are technical innovations free of the fates where power laws spin the threads, pundits measure them but trends snip them? Are the daughters of necessity also the masters of the technical lifecycle? Mosaic and the web browser in general made the web go, and the pundits said it would ever be so. But the heyday of the web browser is ending or so it is said. Long live the PC Client for where there might be one icon before, now there will be many each with its own non-interoperating XML format. Standards schmandards, I want candy. What isn't waning? HTTP and URLs. So you have a case for the architecture over the implementation. I have to wonder if the web arch document would have resulted in a success in 1991-93. I doubt it. A URL made a lot more sense than a URI but 20/20 hindsight and all that implies. The only predictor of long term success is that an idea or innovation reproduces into the next generation. The 85% of XML that works unarguably is all SGML, so SGML is wildly successful even if only mildly innovative. As to money, no one made money on jet technology until its main innovators lost the war and changed their citizenships. Meanwhile, those VRML people keep trying. Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos laugh at our feebleness. len From: Joshua Allen [mailto:joshuaa@m...] Yeah, that's right. I think these architectural principles behind URIs were just as important as having a killer app. 
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