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Re: The Best Technologies Don't Win

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: The Best Technologies Don't Win
• From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
• Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 23:53:52 +0200
• In-reply-to: <7411F30464DC9C479FB14CFD348D71D981CF60@U...>
• Organization: Dyomedea (http://dyomedea.com)
• References: <7411F30464DC9C479FB14CFD348D71D981CF60@U...>

Of course, we all know that the best technologies don't win, but I don't
really agree with the rest of your mail...

Le jeudi 06 juillet 2006 à 16:32 -0500, Bullard, Claude L (Len) a
écrit :
>  Thinking about the various means the web uses to select technologies,
> they typically come down to 'the wisdom of crowds' meme (eg, PageRank,
> EigenTrust) and reputations.  Given the individual and therefore the
> crowd tendancy to choose against the negative and affirm that which they
> already believe, I don't think the web is ever capable of choosing the
> best technology.  It won't recognize it if it is something entirely new
> and if it is old, it is seldom worth reselling.  There is some threshold
> where an idea or technology is not oversold but sufficiently represented
> that it takes the lead and at that point, lock-in occurs even if there
> are better options for some measure of better.  Pachinko.
> 
> The web tends to mediocrity not excellence.   It makes a good stew for
> the masses but is incapable of creating an optimized application for a
> narrow scope.  Some work requires deep expertise, not consensus and the
> web can't think that deeply on any given topic.

OTH, the web is as tough as a jungle. The applications that survive,
elegant or not, are good in their ways and what we call Web 2.0 is often
based on cleaner principles than what we were seeing one of two years
ago.

Mediocrity doesn't scale on the web and there seems to be a rather
encouraging tendency to go toward simplicity as illustrated by the
success of REST services (even if most of them aren't really RESTful).

> We have XSD because it got the most votes at the time.   It's that
> simple.  The damming thing is, that is what the web does, not best or
> worst, but simply does at all.  Worse is better because that is all it
> is capable of.   Chalk up another win for objectivism.

The Web hasn't chosen W3C XML Schema. The Web largely lives without any
schema language and when there is one, DTDs are still largely
predominant. If we spoke about the Web, I wouldn't bet on W3C XML
Schema! There is a tendency in the Web technology stack to reject over
complex specs and I am not sure at all that W3C XML Schema will ever be
widely used on the Web.

That being said, I agree that W3C XML Schema is dominant in the crowd of
"XML enterprise developers" but that's a relatively small community
compared to the Web community.

Eric 
-- 
GPG-PGP: 2A528005
Did you know it? Python has now a Relax NG (partial) implementation.
                                          http://advogato.org/proj/xvif/
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Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(ISO) RELAX NG   ISBN:0-596-00421-4 http://oreilly.com/catalog/relax
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
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  • The Best Technologies Don't Win
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L \(Len\)" <len.bullard@i...>

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