Re: complexity

> > My desire for simplicity is for authorship first and implementation
> > second. Why? Because these documents are going to be authored a lot
> > more often than implemented.
>
>This approach is not realistic. The best you can do is to weigh up the
>benefits.
>
>Otherwise you might just as well claim that computers should generally
>think for you. After all, they are much more often used than invented...
>
>It doesn't help that a standard is nice to the user/author, if it can't
>realistically be implemented with current technology. Today it's easier
>to create a fairly complete operating system than a fairly complete web
>browser! And even the most advanced existing browsers still implement
>only a fraction of what W3C has devised.

Which is because the idea of a complete operating system isn't nearly as 
modern as a complete browser. I agree that simplicity of authorship and 
simplicity of implementation are very important and they usually go hand in 
hand -- usually. And I fully expect any specs being written or revised now 
to take into consideration how difficult something is to implement. What I 
don't care for is specs that give us neither. As you said in another post 
CSS2 and XForms give you more of a headache than backwards compatibility. 
There are various reasons that these specs are unusable and unimplementable 
and I usually find that the ones that are difficult to author are also 
difficult to implement and vice-versa.

Orion Adrian

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Received on Friday, 9 April 2004 12:21:03 UTC