On 8/27/20 11:55 AM, Ashley Dixon wrote:
Well said; thanks for the correction.
Of course. My intention is to positively contribute to and learn from
the community.
Mathematical notation can be seen as a tightly coupled analogue
to this sort of typesetting: the same book that introduced
Algebraic expressions (Cossike numbers) and the equals sign ('=')
into the English-speaking world also suggested the use of
the word "zenzizenizenike" to represent `x^8` [1]. Solid ideas
will stick due to, as you said, their own merits; the form of the
representation is generally redundant.
Nevertheless, as xkcd so brilliantly explains, TeX inspires a level
of blind trust in the content of a document [2]. As long as you avoid
proposing standards in the form of an animated GIF, you're probably
going to be OK. ;-)
I wonder if this is a side effect of the fact that TeX / LaTeX is a
difficult markup language to work in and takes considerably more time
and effort than simple text. As such, there is a good chance that the
idea that someone takes the time to express in (La)TeX is probably more
completely thought out than simple text. After all, why would someone
spend the time and exert the effort to finely polish a half baked idea
in (La)TeX?
Disclaimer: I'm speaking in general and do not mean to imply anything
towards Caveman's efforts. It takes gumption to go against the status quo.
I concur, but this was about the reference implementation.
Do you mean reference as opposed to initial. Meaning that the reference
implementation has had some time to grow and evolve and be optimized.
Fair enough.
It would be impossible to make the initial implementation the crème
de la crème of all implementations, unless the protocol was never
intended to expand.
With what little I know about statistics, I think that there is a very
small but still greater than zero percent chance of it happening. It's
just *EXTREMELY* unlikely. ;-)
We do see some reference implementations being used as the de
facto choice for supporting many standards, such as Apache Tomcat
as the ref. imp. for Java Servlets, but as the name would
suggest, reference implementations are only intended to be used
as a reference to developers of future implementations.
I don't think anything precludes the use of the reference implementation.
Given that things grow and evolve, I think it means that the reference
implementation needs to be used /somewhere/ for the people maintaining
it to gain experience and knowledge germane to said reference
implementation. Granted, this can be a small subset and does not need
to be on the front lines.
Moreover, these ridiculous restrictions only encourage various
implementations to deviate from the standard, adding their
own non-standard extensions like "HillaryMail HTML support".
Implementation developers are always going to add stupid things to
their software (just look at the GNU `typeof` introspection mess),
but the standard text itself should certainly not encourage
such behaviour.
Indeed.
I also think that it's important to keep in mind that sometimes there
are external limitations that dictate what can and can not be done.
Like the fact that communications circuits were not guaranteed to be
8-bit clean when email (RFC 822 and what predates it) and SMTP (RFC 821
and what predates it). It's not any more fair to blame the authors of
RFC 821 for not supporting 8-bit than it is to blame Sir Tim Burners-Lee
for not including encryption when he developed HTML and HTTP.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
