Re: The illusion of simplicity and low cost in data design and computing

> "Open" being able to offer a choices of likely tools seems more useful
>   than identifying a single application, to me at least.
>
>   liam

Identifying the right set of applications (toolset) to have, depends on the
level of abstraction we want to work at.

I think that neither too-low level of abstraction (the swiss-army knife) or
extremely-high level of abstraction (flying in a plane) are convenient in
most typical cases.

I would personally prefer a car, or even better, a bike.

Thanks,
Dimitre

On Thu, Aug 11, 2022 at 6:37 PM Liam R. E. Quin <[email protected]>
wrote:

> On Thu, 2022-08-11 at 22:05 +0100, Michael Kay wrote:
> >
> > Eric Raymond's quote would be valid if the operating system
> > constrained all files to be XML, say. But it's not valid for an
> > operating system that can support any file format, but can also
> > reliably tell the application that it's reading an XML file rather
> > than a JSON file (or more precisely, one that can identity the
> > application that wrote the file and tell you what claims that
> > application made about the file format).
> >
>
> MacOS (the pre-Unix OS) could do this (to some extent). It was a pain,
> and made the system massively less flexible than Unix. For example, if
> i make an SVG file in Inkscape (to use today's application names), i
> might then want to look at it in Inkview or in a Web browser, and i
> might want to edit it in Oxygen XML Editor.
>
> Putting the applications before the documents is the wrong way round.
>
> However, i do agree that file extensions suck, and the Unix "file"
> command (Ian Darwin of SoftQuad wrote the public domain version of
> that) is incredibly useful but limited and not 100% reliable. Of
> course, nothing is 100% reliable except the statement that noting is
> 100% reliable...
>
> "Open" being able to offer a choices of likely tools seems more useful
> than identifying a single application, to me at least.
>
> liam
>
> --
> Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
> Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
> XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
> Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations:  http://www.fromoldbooks.org
>
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-- 
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev
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