[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Excellent Insight on Standards Development vs Invention

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Excellent Insight on Standards Development vs Invention
• From: Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@p...>
• Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 12:30:20 +0000
• Organization: Propylon
• Reply-to: sean.mcgrath@p...
• User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 (Windows/20040502)

On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 08:44:00 -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len)
<len.bullard@i...> wrote:

>> Good stuff.  Everyone should read this.
>> 
>> http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/11/11/AtomInnovation
>  
>

[Mike Champion]
> Yup, good stuff.  But it raises some more questions for me:

>- What does this have to do with the main critique of Atom, that it
>just adds to the "standards" confusion without solving significant
>real world problems?  Tim's loyal opposition (mainly Dare, AFAIK)
>aren't saying "add more unproven junk into Atom" they're saying  to
>not bother with the Atom format standard  since the RSS mess is ugly
>but under control; rather focus on an Atom API standard, where worse
>is definitely NOT better.

My take is that Atom is about sorting out the "bits on the wire". Sorting out the "bits on the wire" is, to my mind, infinitely better than hiding everything under an API.

A lot depends on ones attitude to APIs. Personally I think APIs to document formats are more often than not, a bad idea (http://www.itworld.com/nl/xml_prac/04182002/pf_index.html). But then again, I'm sort of an extremist doc-head :-)

Sean
http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com

• Follow-Ups:
  • Bits vs APIS - was Excellent Insight on Standards Development vs Invention
    • From: Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@g...>

• Prev by Date: Re: XML Performance in Client-Server Interactions
• Next by Date: Re: Excellent Insight on Standards Development vs Invention
• Previous by thread: RE: Excellent Insight on Standards Development vs Invention
• Next by thread: Bits vs APIS - was Excellent Insight on Standards Development vs Invention
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread