Ross Singer wrote:
My point is that there's a step before that, possibly, where the
"theory" behind unAPI, Jangle, whatever, is tested to even see if it's
going in the right direction before writing it up formally as an RFC.
I don't think the lack of adoption of unAPI has anything to do with
the prose of it's specification document. The RFC format is useful
for later adopters, but people that, say, jumped on the Atom
syndication format as a good idea didn't need an RFC first, they
developed a spec, /then/ wrote the standard once they had an idea of
how it needed to work.
I think this is a really important point, for us to get used to. Good
formal standards are built _from_ best practices tested through
experience. Too often we try to do it vice versa, and wind up spending
an awful lot of time on the details of standards that turn out to
actually not solve the problem we wanted to solve as optimally as it
could have been solved.
Jonathan
