Re: Bell on Standards

[Henry Story <henry.story@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, on the whole a good article. It fails to mention Java as an 
amazing standards setting success story even though it fully complies 
with his own stated requirement

	"faux standards such as SQL and Unix/Posix that failed to provide for 
the testing 	of 	interoperability and thus became little more than 
meaningless check-box 	requirements."

This in any case is much too hard on unix than is reasonable, as many 
open source projects that have written software that compiles on these 
numerous so called, incompatible platforms have shown. Gorden Bell 
fails to see that unix has done to software what IBM did to hardware: 
completely componentize it around interfaces, and open up the flodgates 
of implementation competition. But then  Gordon Bell is working for 
Microsoft, so this blindness is not so surprising.

	In any case just the first bullet point

 #1 A standard delineates a point of homogeneity, enabling 
heterogeneity, change, and unbridled innovation in other areas.

Would tend to make me think that RDF is the solution, and so vote for 
RSS1.0, since it captures nicely the central needs but allows easy 
extensibility and innovation, building on a now well defined and 
mathematically backed up framework.  I think all the other points for 
me tend to favor RSS1.0.

In fact I still fail to see that Atom has much to offer beyond that.
In any case I would be surprised to find that Atom had anything to 
offer which could not be done with a small extension to RSS1.0.

Henry



On 16 Oct 2004, at 20:17, Robert Sayre wrote:

> Tim Bray wrote:
> > Here's some homework, a reading assignment for the WG: 
> > http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=210
>
> That article is so worth it.
>
> Bullet point #1:
>
> * A standard delineates a point of homogeneity, enabling 
> heterogeneity, change, and unbridled innovation in other areas.
>
> Reminded me of Matt Webb's excellent "This is About Atom" piece.
> http://interconnected.org/home/2004/08/16/this_is_about_atom
>
> Robert Sayre