RE: REST and the Web

> > (*Maybe* it would be possible to get TAG to agree about "A", but it
> > would take heaps of hubris to think that was all there is to it).
> 
> It isn't rude to stop people breaking the Web, any more
> than it's rude to stop them breaking railway tracks.
> 
> It *is* a question of putting it in the terms that a developer of a
web
> site will understand, and giving examples, and putting it into talks
at
> conferences and making gentle fun of sites which do it wrong.
> 

I think we all (most of us) want to stop people from breaking the web.
But I think we (vendors and W3C) have to bear the brunt of the blame for
the fact that people are breaking it, and it takes a change at W3C and
vendor level to fix things.  Blaming users is unlikely to be productive,
IMO.

I also think that a "re-education campaign" could be a useful part of a
solution, but only a small part.  Users/Developers respond better to
pragmatism than politics, and if the whole "one true web architecture"
evangelism gets too political/sour, people will just tune out and use
whatever gets the job done (like flash mx).  People don't use HTTP+HTML
because they *need* to; they use these technologies because these
technologies make it easy to do particular jobs that the users *want* to
do.  Let's not pretend that developers have some dependency on us and
have to do what we say; we work for the developers, not the other way
around.

Received on Monday, 1 April 2002 14:11:39 UTC