• To: XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Competing Specifications - A Good or Bad Thing?
• From: David Megginson <dmeggin@a...>
• Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 20:20:43 -0400
• In-reply-to: <1081201995.2522.60.camel@z...>
• References: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EE03F9F58C@h...> <1081201995.2522.60.camel@z...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040401 Debian/1.6-4

Rick Marshall wrote:

> which leads me to my real conclusion: simple things are good. they can
> be understood, implemented, and used in the lifetime of a human being.
> complex things are of no use because they can't.

Here's the famous codification of that idea by Richard Gabriel:

   http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

He's writing about programming languages and operating systems, but the same 
applies to specifications and standards.

And you can add RSS to your list of successful one-person specs: love him or 
hate him, Dave Winer's the one who initially pulled RSS out of Netscape's 
dumpster, slapped on a new paint job, and made it possible for it (or them, 
since there's more than one RSS) to grow into XML's greatest success.


All the best,


David

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