From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Fri Aug 11 2000 - 23:55:34 PDT
> It has to be noncommercial, and it has to be linked to a few, ideally
> 2-3 persons which have demonstrated past integrity is aspects to above
> goals. The methuselah-in-spe standards have to be succinct, formally
> defined as well as be supplied with a demo implementation in a
> widespread, standard language (say, ANSI C) and come with a rich
> torture test suite. It should be possible to test implementations with
> a simple "make test" from a test suite digitally signed by standard's
> authors, and no one else.
Caveat: I know we're talking markup here, but I have a lot of the same issues (and
waffle on viewpoints) -wrt- whether HTTP itself is the ubertransport. In the
communication abstraction / namespace area, InfernoSpaces had a lot of the
qualities you're talking about... Small group, demonstrated integrity and
fanatical devotion to maintaining simplicity and pushing an abstraction, whole spec
for 9P / Styx grokkable in one page of overview and a dozen or so detailed man
pages, totally language-neutral, ANSI C and Java implementations, handles arbitrary
ASCII data. Test suite nonexistant or I just don't remember it, marks off for
that... absolutely no interest in standardizing it through any recognized
standards body, not sure if that's a virtue or a vice but virtuous for the purposes
of this discussion. Noncommercial inasmuch as the groups that made it were driven
more by "do the right thing" than by pure commercial interest, sad to see how
screwed up the marketing dept. made that whole effort.
Too bad Lucent has apparently tried to eradicate all evidence that InfernoSpaces
existed.
jb
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