[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Costs, benefits, and emperors with wardrobe malfunctions - was Re: [xml-
On Apr 4, 2004, at 3:37 PM, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote: > At 6:48 AM -0700 4/4/04, Rex Brooks wrote: > >> Lastly, who wants to cast the vote the prevents allowing the only >> viable, public standard completely uncoupled from partisan politics, >> that stands a chance of saving a single life in a time when another >> incident such as 9/11 or 3/11 could happen at any time, especially if >> that public standard, because it IS public, CAN be amended to do its >> job better? > > > The only reasonable way to judge a standard like this is to tally up > the advantages *AND DISADVANTAGES* and see if the advantages outweigh > the disadvantages. Sometimes it's a judgement call which different, > rational people may come to different conclusions about. I agree, except that it's almost ALWAYS a judgment call. XML 1.1 is a very good example -- sensible people can disagree on the costs and benefits, especially since the costs are now and the benefits are sometime in the future, maybe. Furthermore, some of the costs and benefits are intangible; I, for example, generally think XMl 1.1 is a good idea simply because it has a cleaner alignment with Unicode and fixes an outright bug in XML 1.0 (the infamous NEL character, which is clearly a line terminator in Unicode). XML can't be "Unicode with angle brackets" but then pick which bits of Unicode it finds convenient to actually align with without losing a bit of conceptual integrity. (This is not to restart that permathread, just to illustrate problem of comparing the tangible costs of incompatibility vs the intangible benefits of improved conceptual integrity.) As far as I can tell, it's the realization that widespread consensus on the cost-benefit tradeoff for a given proposal is more or less impossible under the W3C rules that drove a small group of powerful companies to invent the WS-Emperor spec development process. They got the "important" players in a room (or email list) and hashed out the basic architecture. I presume, but have no evidence, that lots of horses were traded to come up with something that was mutually acceptable. THEN, they bring in a widening circle of companies to review the specs (I have the image of a troop of monkeys picking bugs out of the gorillas' fur), and FINALLY send it to OASIS. This is actually an interesting experiment -- they know that doing the whole thing in an open way leads to 5-year-and-counting efforts such as XQuery/XSLT 2, but they know that having IBM, BEA, and MS all go off and invent similar but incompatible specs will kill the network effect that keeps all the balls (bubbles?) in the air. They're trying to get the advantages of some openness without the paralysis that all those conflicting judgments based on very different experiences and values tends to produce. Watching the media events where the emperor is being draped in imaginary standards and having the glitches be called the equivalent of wardrobe malfunctions rather than public nudity does get a little tiresome, I agree. I believe Don Box said it clearly the other day: "For those of us who work on the WS-* protocols at MSFT, we look at this exercise as defining the public "API" to our next generation of technologies." http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/dbox/default.aspx?key=2004-04-03T08:01: 14Z There's a word for this I just tracked down -- mokita http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19991220 "the truth that everyone knows but no one talks about". Anyway, there seems to be a lot of mokita surrounding this topic. I have never seen or heard of a viable, "public standard completely uncoupled from partisan politics"; the mokita is that politics is pervasive in the 'standards' world. Likewise, it's time to face up to the fact that most of the WS-* specs are not 'standards'; the mokita is that it is they are treaties between competitors that may or may not actually work, and may or may not be a viable basis for standards in the long run. I advocate a open mind, but healthy skepticism about all of them; we need to consider the short run costs and benefits of adopting any one spec, and we need to consider the necessity of evolving the whole mess into something coherent, or allowing it to die if the experiment turns out to be a failure.
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