Re: Possible *third* proposal for ISSUE-41 Distributed Extensibility

On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 04:14:26 +0200, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Sam Ruby wrote:
>>
>> License information is an example of annotation that is added to web
>> pages which is meant to be parsed software that is independent of the
>> site.  Some believe that RDFa is the way to capture such annotation.
>> Some believe that Microdata is the way to capture such.  I don't happen
>> to believe that there is one true way.
>
> We're far more likely to make the Web a useful place if there is one true
> way, whatever that way is.
>
> Not having one true way is the same as not having interoperability.  
> That's a bad thing. It's what working groups like this one are intended
> to prevent. If the use case for "ISSUE-41 Distributed Extensibility"
> mechanisms is explicitly to make it possible to do things that don't have
> interoperability, then I for one would consider that a step backwards.
> That's an anti-goal.

"Distributed extensibility" *means* the ability to do things interoperably  
without having to pick the one true way in advance. And so the use case is  
to maintain interoperability for things where the best (or even most  
popular) one true way is not yet clear. Which has the useful effect of  
providing for backwards compatibility when the one true way is actually  
selected and baked in.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Wednesday, 31 March 2010 08:32:05 UTC