Re: RDFa API - adding Namespace

On Mon, 11 Oct 2010 09:19:43 +0100
Nathan <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:

> perhaps if we ask "why not add it?", is there a good reason not to?

Antoine de Saint Exupery (author of one of my favourite books) wrote:

 Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a
 plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher.

Which is usually translated into English as:

 Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add,
 but when there is nothing left to take away.

While perfection is certainly too ambitious a target, I do think we
should be guided by the principle of less-is-more. A smaller API spec is
going to be easier to implement, resulting in a greater number of
implementations, and hopefully fewer places for bugs to hide.

The API spec needs to tread a careful path between minimal and useful.
There are some things that clearly need to be in it, but when something
seems optional we need to ask what percentage of users are actually
going to use it, and might they be better served by layering a
library on top of the API to provide syntactic sugar and shortcuts?

Bear in mind that this:

 function NS(p){return function(s){return p+s}}

is less than 50 characters.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Monday, 11 October 2010 23:40:26 UTC