RE: Is W3C Technology Fragmented or Unified?

> From: Geoff Deering
[...]
> I know I have enough on my hands just trying to keep up with basic W3C
> technologies.  Whose the guru who has all this encapsulated 
> in a vision
> *AND* really knows how to deploy all this in one CMS?

I don't think it's realistic anymore to expect one single guru to know
all these things, but having separate groups of developers within the
organisation with good experience of one of the technologies. You want
a system at the core which is modular, and can deliver the various
markup solutions based on a shared pool of resources (be it XML, an RDBM,
web service interfaces to complex - and legacy - enterprise systems, etc).

I think somebody mentioned Cocoon. That's certainly one of the ways I
can see this moving towards. Again, you wouldn't ask a single guru to develop
your very own, in house version of a Cocoon-like system plus all the
various output modules. You'd get a concerted effort to get a central
framework in place, but making sure that it can indeed be expanded in
future to output any standard formats - ideally rolling them out one by one
(saying from the start that you need xhtml,xml,svg,rdf,atom,kitchensinkML,etc
is not a realistic proposition, and the decision-makers need to be made aware
that this is the case).

However, I don't think that the opposite trend - having a single monolithic
super markup language that does everything (and includes the complete DTD of
kitchensinkML) is a viable alternative either. I do see the need for separate
languages for separate purposes. It's true, however, that we need to be careful
not to get lost in the see of similar-but-not-quite ones (RSS vs Atom, and all their
separate versions)

Just thinking out loud. Not really an answer to your question, I know...

Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Webmaster / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk

Received on Wednesday, 25 August 2004 14:19:59 UTC