Subject: Bell on Standards

From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 10:35:04 -0700

Here's some homework, a reading assignment for the WG: 
http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=210

---

From: Robert Sayre <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2004 14:17:03 -0400

> 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

---

From: Henry Story <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2004 11:50:21 +0200

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:

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

---

From: "Bob Wyman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 16:26:15 -0400

Henry Story wrote:
> But then Gordon Bell is working for Microsoft, so this blindness
> is not so surprising.
	This sort of libel has no place in this group. Your cheap shot at
Gordon Bell merely proves that you have no idea of the man's contribution to
this industry -- long before Microsoft decided to fund his retirement...
	If Bell fails to praise Unix it is probably because he remembers the
long years during which Unix offered little more than pipes as the solution
to all issues of componentization. Gordon Bell, on the other hand, led the
development efforts at Digital that resulted in such innovations as the
Common Runtime Library for all languages on VMS, shared libraries, common
calling standards, layered product architectures, etc. that were the real
introducers of the idea of componentization to the software world. But, one
would have to understand and care about history in order to know these
things and many others... Unfortunately, understanding history takes much
more effort then the cheap shot you delivered.

		bob wyman

---

From: Henry Story <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 09:27:17 +0200

Thanks for pointing this out. I had failed to make the link between the 
name and the person.

I retract that statement, and will go and study the article a lot more 
carefully.

Henry Story