Re: in defense of standards

> [snip another 'spec spiel', my first from Sandro; tim gives me these; 
> word to the wise, they haven't worked yet :)]

Well, you gave me such an opening, how could I resist?  Ah, I suppose
I should have.

To me, the "null hypothesis" (nothing normative from W3C on this
matter) is where we end up if we can't find anything useful to say.
Or it's where we are until we *do* find something useful to say.  But
in the mean time, we should be trying to figure out what might be
useful.   

I'm still not quite sure if you were attacking my specific proposal
(roughly: "People *should not* assert RDF which has an inconsistent
web closure") or arguing something more broad.

> > and you're still going to build an open systems, I think you're
> > just arguing for an undocumented protocol.
> 
> Or evolved ones. Or these aren't "protocols" in the networky sense.

I'm trying to think back to how your SciAm demo works.  Clearly there
are protocols in the most traditional networky sense there, but I'm
not clear how they relate to URIs in the RDF being passed around.  Do
they?

I think you're saying that it wouldn't really matter -- that's just in
the domain of one application.

> Oh, I thought W3C specs were "recommendations", not standards :)

Personally, I think of standards as specifications which are widely
adopted (in at least some community), and the W3C specs as being
recommended by the W3C members to become standards. 

     -- sandro

Received on Friday, 10 October 2003 10:51:42 UTC