Re: Manifesto: Rules for standards-makers by Dave Winer

Hi all

Love this document, and there's little to fault at all. My only critique
would be that "It totally doesn't matter what we call it" isn't really a
corollary of "Perfection is a waste of time", for me.

I'd say that naming things is hard, and one mustn't try to be completely
right first time. But the confusion that can persist when something is
incorrectly named, and that name is allowed to live on despite actual
practice, can be very damaging in the long run. You end up with a situation
where something is "obvious" to those with long experience in a field, but
commonly misunderstood by those working on the edge of it or engineers
(experienced or not) coming new to a topic. A good format (for example)
allows a new version to be rename things as needed, with old names marked
as a deprecated aliases (or whatever is appropriate).

Clarity of language is even more important when communicating with people
whose first language isn't English, not less so - the "symbols" thing is
just wrong I think.

George


On Mon, 14 Dec 2020 at 22:57, Heather Vescent <heathervescent@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Interesting piece by Dave Winer. What do you agree with? What do you
> disagree with?
> http://scripting.com/2017/05/09/rulesForStandardsmakers.html
>
> -H
>
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-- 
George Lund
Senior Developer for GOV.UK Verify
Government Digital Service