- From: Rob Shearer <Rob.Shearer@networkinference.com>
- Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 18:29:06 -0700
- To: "Yoshio FUKUSHIGE" <fuku@w3.org>, "RDF Data Access Working Group" <public-rdf-dawg@w3.org>
- Cc: "RDF Data Access Working Group" <public-rdf-dawg@w3.org>
> > But if there are features that are outside a core that absolutely > > every implementation needs to provide, I would much prefer not to > > spend the time to standardize them in our first version, even if > > they would take less time than some other features. > > I want to know other members' opinion on that point. Am I correct in assuming that Dan's statement is missing a 'not'? "...if there are features that are outside a core that NOT absolutely every implementation needs to provide..." If so, I agree with Dan's sentiment. I freely admit that there is a theoretical argument to be made that more standards are better, no matter what, but in practice I don't think it works that way. Standards bodies don't always come up with the best solution, or even a very good solution, and the "more standards are better" philosophy only stands up if everybody always chose to adopt any standard if it was available. That's not my experience with industry response to standards. Problems that need interoperability solutions immediately force the adoption of standards, even if the standards suck in many ways. If people can get by without a standard for a little while, then they'll spend the time trying to come up with solutions that suck less than the standard does. Worse, there's even the temptation to try to own an emerging technology space, so there's an incentive to avoid an existing standard as an attempt to leverage a current position into future dominance in that segment. Add to all this the notion that (particularly within the W3C and the semantic web) additional standards tend to "dilute the brand", and the short story is that premature standards can often have negative impacts on true industry standardization in the long term. I think it's important to address the real problems that are preventing real RDF applications from being written today, and to me those problems center on the inability to extract data from RDF.
Received on Tuesday, 11 May 2004 21:31:30 UTC