2011/6/3 Benoît Fleury <benoit.fle...@gmail.com>: > I tend to agree with you. The uniform interface of the web (reduced > set of HTTP verbs, links...) is what make all these applications > possible. We know what to do when we have the URL to the flickr image. > But we could do so much more.
I agree with you there. We can certainly continue to make things better! But (as the HTML folk learned w/ the success of HTML5) the way to go forward is to *build on* the past, not throw it out and start over. If we can come up with new technologies that interoperate, that provide backward-compatibility hooks, and that provide transition paths, then they have a chance to improve the platform that everyone is using. The future has turned out to be much messier than past architects imagined. We have neither solved "strong AI" nor have we convinced humans to generate content which adheres to rigid semantics. Instead we have a strange new world where "unstructured databases" can exist, often can be searched, and "most likely" will generate useful results. Probabilistic models have triumphed over formal correctness. And if you think that's horrifying, you should see some of the work my former advisor is/was doing on "failure-oblivious computing" (http://people.csail.mit.edu/rinard/acceptability_oriented_computing/). Rather shockingly, the best thing to do is often to "muddle through"... But now we've drifted far off topic; all of this is rather orthogonal to the goal of making systems which people can more broadly understand, use, and modify. Having a beautiful small kernel is a good way to make an understandable system; throwing in everything but the kitchen sink is a good way to make an unobjectionable system which gets adopted easily by lots of different people with strong preexisting ideas about the way things ought to work. I would imagine the fonc project would want to steer a middle course. (Alan has previously spoken of the need for extensibility, which is one way to build a popular featureful system out of a small kernel.) --scott -- ( http://cscott.net ) _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
