Re: RE : Re: Federation protocols

Michał 'rysiek' Woźniak wrote:
> Dnia środa, 12 czerwca 2013 o 21:03:17 Simon Tennant napisał(a):
>> On 12 June 2013 20:38, Michał 'rysiek' Woźniak <rysiek@fwioo.pl> wrote:
>>> Again, show me such a de facto standard, please. And until you do, I will
>>> voice my opinion we need interoperability. I don't really care if it's
>>> interoperability between *instances* or *implementations* as long as it
>>> is a
>>> (de facto) standard and without a doubt (by a huge margin) *most* of the
>>> libre
>>> people using this kind of technology use this particular
>>> protocol/standard.
>> That's not how successful standardisation works.
>>
>> At one point the gopher protocol was THE way to access information on the
>> internet.
>>
>> Then some annoying little upstart at CERN started trying to get people to
>> use his standard for hypertext. And nobody wanted to even have him speak at
>> hypertext conferences. But he kept on working on it and building
>> *real-world* use cases and applications and a software ecosystem.
>>
>> Others started contributing code to the NCSA browser and httpd.
>>
>> HTML was successful because someone went and built something that was
>> incompatible with the gopher protocol.
>>
>> THEN it was standardised.
>>
>> Bottom up works. Top down gives us standards that only a telco could love.
> This is a completely different situation. Newcommer (HTML) vs. incumbent
> (Gopher) is different than a situation with several strong contestants
> (Diaspora, DFRN2, etc).
>
> We already have good standards built bottom-up. Time to agree on some and work
> from there.
>
Actually HTTP vs. gopher - both support(ed) multiple media types. It's 
also worth noting that early
browsers supported both HTTP and gopher (and ftp and other things). It 
took a while for HTML
to become dominant and for other protocols to be phased out of browsers.

Similarly, an awful lot of chat clients are multi-protocol.

An awful lot of mail clients and servers used to support multiple 
messaging protocols (SMTP, UUCP, NNTP, Fido, ...).

Top-down only works if you're a dominant player and can enforce your 
preferred interface.

Miles Fidelman

Received on Wednesday, 12 June 2013 19:36:51 UTC