RE: NameValue and NameValueList data types

 Jorgen,
 let's see: HTML at first was made by no standards making body so
it was doomed from the start to incompatibilities and failure.
What's replaced it in the last decade? Oh, it's HTML. 8-)
 I mean that de-facto standards don't evolve in standards bodies,
they evolve out there in the wild, and when a standard is really
necessary, it will emerge. Then a standards body can a)
acknowledge it, or b) build on it. But with nothing to start
from, design-by-committee tends to show its worse face. What good
are standards from standards bodies, universally accepted and
never implemented or deployed?
 And about .net, perl, python etc: a map is a list of key-value
pairs. Naturally represented as an array of structs. That's how
Apache does it. How else can .net or python implementation
represent a map _on_the_wire?_ Yeah, they can change the
namespaces or stuff, but the logical structure will be the same.
Therefore it's as well for them to accept what's already out
there.
 Jorgen, what makes you think the same could not happen again?
 I know the arguments I have are not exactly technical, though.

                   Jacek Kopecky

                   Senior Architect, Systinet (formerly Idoox)
                   http://www.systinet.com/



On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Jorgen Thelin wrote:

 >
 >
 > > -----Original Message-----
 > > From: Rich Salz [mailto:rsalz@zolera.com]
 > > Sent: 20 December 2001 14:06
 > > To: Jorgen Thelin
 > > Cc: xml-dist-app@w3.org; 'Jacek Kopecky'; Peter Hendry
 > > Subject: Re: NameValue and NameValueList data types
 > >
 > >
 > > > The problem we (as an industry) have is that until we
 > > standardize the
 > > > representation of a name-value list, we will never achieve any true
 > > > interoperability of such a fundamental programming language
 > > construct
 > > > as name-value pairs.  An "Apache standard" for this type
 > > > representation is not going to provide this
 > >
 > > The success of Apache as a de-facto standard argues strongly
 > > otherwise.
 >
 > For the Java representation maybe, but what about .NET, Perl, Python,
 > Smalltalk, etc, etc, etc?
 >
 > At the end of the day, Apache is not, and I am sure would not want to
 > be, a standards making body.  The current Apache "standard" for this
 > name-value representation is driven by pragmatism to exercise this area,
 > but I don't think anyone would claim this is a real long term solution.
 > "Just tough it out and make the rest of the industry fall in line" will
 > not work.
 >
 > I am not disparaging the efforts of the Apache community, just pointing
 > to the fact that without a single standard for the representation of
 > name-value pairs that *everyone* can agree to, we cannot get beyond the
 > problem of having at least two "Walled Camps" which I had thought this
 > industry had finally matured past.  :-(
 >
 >

Received on Thursday, 20 December 2001 14:37:49 UTC