RE: good design vs evolveability (was TAG "Architecture of the W orld Wide Web" new draft published)

Mike,

Shirky had one interesting phrase at the end "In 5 years, DVD, HDTV,
voice-over-IP, and Java will all be able to interoperate because of some new
set of protocols which, like HTTP and HTML, is going to be weak, relatively
unco-ordinated, imperfectly implemented and, in the end, invincible"

So, is this protocol he mentions XML or is this protocol SOAP?

Cheers,
Dave

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On
> Behalf Of Champion, Mike
> Sent: Friday, November 08, 2002 1:01 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: OT: good design vs evolveability (was TAG
> "Architecture of the
> W orld Wide Web" new draft published)
>
>
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Mark Baker [mailto:[email protected]]
> > Sent: Friday, November 08, 2002 1:32 PM
> > To: Champion, Mike
> > Cc: [email protected]
> > Subject: Re: TAG "Architecture of the World Wide Web" new draft
> > published
> >
>
> > > Consensus is the only authority ... other than Father Darwin,
> > > the Invisible Hand, or however one wants to anthropomorphize the
> > > forces that ultimately determine whether some spec works in
> > the real world
> > > :-)
> >
> > You mean "good design"? 8-)
>
> See http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html
>
> "The network is littered with ideas that would have worked
> had everybody
> adopted them. Evolvable systems begin partially working right
> away and then
> grow, rather than needing to be perfected and frozen. Think
> VMS vs. Unix,
> cc:Mail vs. RFC-822, Token Ring vs. Ethernet...
>
> Centrally designed protocols start out strong and improve
> logarithmically.
> Evolvable protocols start out weak and improve exponentially.
> It's dinosaurs
> vs. mammals, and the mammals win every time. The Web is not
> the perfect
> hypertext protocol, just the best one that's also currently practical.
> Infrastructure built on evolvable protocols will always be partially
> incomplete, partially wrong and ultimately better designed than its
> competition. "
>
> I'm increasingly humble about how little we collectively
> understand about
> distributed objects, document messaging, service-oriented
> architectures, and
> how to leverage XML to make them work better.  I'm a lot more
> interested in
> making the web services architecture evolveable to it can
> improve as we
> experiment and learn than in making it "well designed" by
> today's criteria.
>
>