From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Wed Mar 15 2000 - 19:23:49 PST
> Why does everyone think HTTPD is the holy grail?
> Does noone remember it's just a hack of the gopher protocol?
>
Heh. Yeah, I used to be just like you... ;-)
Well, certainly, if you'd asked me in oh, '92, I would've told you that
gopher was going to kick this HTTP thing's ass. No backpatching history,
here, I was no Web fan. BUT...
There's this little thing called "The Real World." Look into it...
;-)
jb
PS: OB_SERIOUS: The problem is that HTTP is the only viable opp for
real-world applications that have any sort of deployment in the corporate
world. Seriously. Yeah, it's perverse, and yeah, it's not technically pure
or even close to "The Right Thing" --- but since when does technical purity
win markets? Name one technically superior solution that has won? Beta?
Colecovision? Inmos' Transputer? Objective C? 68XXX? NeWS? Better
proposals in the HDTV space? Lisp / Scheme? Smalltalk? Macintosh? NeXT?
Dick Gabriel had it right --- worse *is* better. Not just in some cynical
sense --- really, honestly, all-around better. The key is to find the local
optima -- to do the simulated annealing / hill-climbing thing when building
technology. That's what cathedral vs. bazaar is *really* all about. I
believe Winer's nailed the local hilltop with XML-RPC, and clarified one
point --- the HTTP as transport point --- in the process.
jb
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