Re: Chaos, Process

[ Sam Hunting wrote: ]
> > >The picture of a vendor consortium leading "the Web to its "full
> > >potential" on the basis of secret (or at least 
> > >unpublished) "axioms" gives me the chills.

> > > The Internet sure wasn't built this way...

[Dan Connolly writes:]

> >What makes you think it was not? I'm pretty certain it was...
> >TCP, IP, SMTP, FTP etc. were specified and
> >deployed long before the June 1996 publication of
> >
> >Architectural Principles of the Internet
> >http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1958.txt

[ Simon St. Laurent writes:]
> Whatever the pros and cons of IETF process - which created the specs
> Dan noted above - it has two large differences from the W3C.
> 
> 1. Membership and proceedings are open. [snip]

I take, then, that TCP, IP, SMTP, FTP were not developed on the basis
of secret or at least (or at least unpublished) "axioms"?

> 2.  I've never heard anyone - in my limited experience, of course -
> reference that document as if it contained a priori axioms, rather
> than years of implementation experience.

A similar process seems to have been contemplated by the editors of the
published (not secret) Recommendation (not Note) for XML 1.0:

<extract>
Note: The colon character within XML names is reserved for
experimentation with name spaces. Its meaning is expected to be
standardized at some future point, at which point those documents using
the colon for experimental purposes may need to be updated. (There is
no guarantee that any name-space mechanism adopted for XML will in fact
use the colon as a name-space delimiter.) In practice, this means that
authors should not use the colon in XML names except as part of
name-space experiments, but that XML processors should accept the colon
as a name character
</extract>

This portion of the XML 1.0 specification has not been subject to any
errata or editorial change -- but it has presumably been overridden by
some a priori axiom?

S.

=====
<? "To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life."
    -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations ?>

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Received on Friday, 2 June 2000 13:28:02 UTC