Re: Chaos, Process

At 10:28 AM 6/2/00 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
>Sam Hunting wrote:
>> Debater's points aside, the picture of a vendor consortium leading "the
>> Web to its "full potential" (TBL's personal architecture document) on
>> the basis of secret (or at least unpublished) "axioms" gives me the
>> chills.
>> 
>> The Internet sure wasn't built this way...
>
>What makes you think it was not? I'm pretty certain it was...
>TCP, IP, SMTP, FTP etc. were specified and
>deployed long before the June 1996 publication of
>
>Architectural Principles of the Internet
>http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1958.txt

Whatever the pros and cons of IETF process - which created the specs Dan
noted above - it has two large differences from the W3C.

1. Membership and proceedings are open.  Want to submit something to the
IETF?  It's not that hard.  Want to create a standard through the IETF?
That may be harder, but it's possible for someone new to show up at the
door and do that.  Getting past the experienced hands and existing
implementations may be difficult, but there aren't a lot of surprises, if
you do your research.

2.  I've never heard anyone - in my limited experience, of course -
reference that document as if it contained a priori axioms, rather than
years of implementation experience.  While the early days of the ARPANET
may have seen some best guesses for what would work based on a large set of
assumptions, it seems to have developed pretty organically, with what
worked surviving and what didn't work disappearing.

Though I was too young to participate for much of the development process
and haven't read every archive personally (yikes!), I don't think Dan's
description is accurate.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

Received on Friday, 2 June 2000 11:50:53 UTC