[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Partyin' like it's 1999
To comment further: an inflection point is only perceived if the scale of movement exceeds the measurement threshold of any function that dispatches based on the interval (a difference that makes a difference). Functions are like viewpoints in chaos and complexity theory; they have a space of operation so to determine if an inflection point is a minor or major perturbation, you have to know or be able to measure the scope of the affective action (an encapsulated inflection may have no couplers of interest). XML has couplers of interest everywhere. 1. The mouse has many variants but is conceptually the same device Englebart demoed minus the chording. 2. The same can be said for keyboards. 3. Except for cosmetics, the windows metaphor has changed little. All are commodities. Low margin or not, big changes in any of these would have couplers of interest everywhere. Is XML a low margin commodity? Yes. Worse, so are the implementations (I'm trying to be less elliptical) so unless the gains of refactoring are obvious and scale out of the view of the developers or attain a mass of support such that the mass is the observable, there isn't much evidence that there is an inflection point worth tracking. I suppose if enough developers make enough noise, it might be. The other approach would be that critical individuals agree (eg. Derek-Denny Brown, Dare Obasanjo, etc. at Microsoft, Tim Bray at Sun, whoever their peers are at Oracle, etc.) who then make the W3C aware that they will be moving to a new consensus. (I'm not discounting the W3C, just that this goes faster and more directly if the requirements originate on the vendor side.) The question is then one of moving the application mass. That isn't certain with the buy-in of those individuals (the customers can resist), but it won't happen at all without them. What one might ask is what changes require a change to the syntax features vs ones that can be achieved by subsetting as was done for SGML to create XML and for which there are examples as you noted. I expect that some parts of this question are answered by your presentation in DC next month, yes? If so, we can take it up in the hallway. len From: Michael Champion [mailto:michaelc.champion@g...] OK, automobiles, television, most home appliances, homebuilding technology ... lots of things have been essentially "good enough" for decades. I'm trying to think of a computer-related technology that exhibits this (mainframes? COBOL?). In the technology industry, who's not busy bein' reborn is busy becomin' a low margin commodity.
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