Why do we write standards?

[Dave Winer]

>>Why not let users experiment with that basic set of tools before we try to
slap them in straitjackets?

It's happening my man.

Tim Bray came for a visit a couple of weeks ago. In the car, on the way to
lunch, I told him that the XML 1.0 spec was working great for us. A few days
before a question had come up on the XML-RPC list, and I didn't know the
answer. I went to the spec, and it had the answer! That's a work that works,
imho.

Who knows, maybe two years from now we'll be looking for an answer and it
will be in the Schema spec or whatever you guys are working on now. I'll
tell you this much, at a practical level, in the real-world, XML is taking
off. It's really happening.

BTW, I have a master's in computer science, and a math degree in graph
theory, so I know at a theoretic level, what all this stuff is about. But 20
years ago I decided to be a commercial developer, and not a theorist. So I
focus entirely on the pragmatic side of these things. My take is that XML
1.0 is ready to go, it's happening in syndication/aggregation and
distributed computing protocols.

One man's opinion only..

Dave

PS: One thing that's really needed is a *simple* spec for vector graphics.
Not PDF-in-XML, just lineto, moveto, fillrect, drawstring, invertrect,
penup, pendown, etc. Refer to Inside Macintosh v1.0, QuickDraw chapter.
Another spec that really worked.


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