From: Dan Brickley (Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Sep 13 2000 - 11:12:16 PDT
On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, Dave Winer wrote:
> I listened
> to the radio show and I heard others who are much more sophisticated in the
> back-stabbing method of software development than you or I are.
I'll take that as a compliment. There weren't many people on that radio
show - you might as well name names as make that kind of semi-vague
claim.
> What was all
> that business about the blink tag and the browser wars? What the hell does
> that have to do with RSS?
We want to see RSS as widely used as HTML. That means every web site on
the planet. To pull this off without having an RSS Spec God or an RSS
Approval Committee for every little add-on, we need to find a way of
decentralising, democratising, local or application-specific extensions.
Principled extension, in the sense that any group can declare and use
their own namespace, rather than fight for a slice of one monolithic,
hotly contested spec. HTML, because of the way it was architected,
became a battleground. XML tries to defuse that situation by allowing
a more loosly coupled approach to evolving these specs.
See Gerald's msg http://www.xent.com/aug00/0972.html
if you're interested in the technical and social reasons for using
namespaces:
[[
Well, after watching HTML's dysfunctional evolution for the last
7 years or so, the value of namespaces seems fairly obvious to me.
They just let anyone make up tags, yet do it in a way that we all
know what we're talking about when we use a certain tag.
]]
Does that help or are you still mystified by the blink-tag / RSS analogy?
Dan
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