Re: Plan3 — A Procedural RDF Programming Language

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Giovanni Tummarello wrote:

> Microformat and (increasingly, for several reasons RDFa) are
> beginning to be seen quite a bit out there.

Well one of the microformat slogans is "pave the cowpaths", i.e.
standardise existing practises, so it's not too surprising that there
should be microformats out there!

Note how this philosophy stands in complete contradistinction to the
W3C's innate philosophy of standardise first and then let the use
cases and implementations come. (The ostensible purpose of CR is to
oppose this, but it doesn't work.)

I'm not standing up for paving cowpaths, just noting the situation.

> the fact that it is out there

Lots of things are out there, though. Choose to do nifty things! You
don't have to do such-and-such just because the opportunity
immediately presents itself.

When the Pentagon got flown into, Donald Rumseld, on the way to a high
level crisis meeting, stopped and helped some of the people on the
way, casualties and digging people out. Later he got criticised for
putting the local needs of a few of his employees in front of the
greater needs of the security of the whole nation.

Thankfully the choice isn't so stark and melodramatic when it comes to
technology! Dijkstra's maxim, "only do what only you can do", is a
much more clearly valid apophthegm.

What did you think about plan3?

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/

Received on Wednesday, 24 September 2008 13:57:15 UTC