...

Let's hear it for ETML!

<< "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you
send.">>
If one is talking about high school love letters perhaps the rule
applies.  That application may even get one a better chance to get
laid *before* your prom night. However, computing of exchange formats
and general computing history tells a different tale.  The greatest
caution is to be applied about human ability to create tempting
shortcuts and create areas of technical relevance where there is in
fact nothing but truth vacum.

I have realized that human computing culture has strong tolerance with
overhead and unefficiency when it does not perceive its side effects.
HTML is probably the best example to date.  HTML was not a language
designed with the objective of efficiency nor elegance but a very
limited purpose to be a text format wrapper.

Its hierarchical inspired structure added with the anarchic and
continuous stacking of resource pointers embodied by its keywords made
it an ideal candidate for being called the first universally accepted
class in an OO sense (you know about polymorphism, thinking of href
and img as flexible properties in an OO jargon).   Nevertheless, the
physical size representing its overhead,  its *instantiation* as a
page was small enough to not have the side effect of its usage being
perceived by its users as unacceptable.  Such acceptance comes in fact
the carrying medium of the technology, namely network, had the
potential of absorbing its side effects and make user perceive that
the impact of its size as minimal.  In fact, one can reasonably assume
had the topology of the network that first accepted been unsufficient
to limit its side effects, HTML would have disappeared as many
languages did because its side effects would not have been acceptable
to its users.  Not as much could be said of XML or other EDI formats
that all have in common the fact that their side effects are actually
perceivable by their users.  In the case of these late ones, overhead
is perceived by users because the physical conditions are not
sufficient to make them disappear and accentuate them.

Another way to say this is that HTML is the exception that confirms a
rule that could be phrased as *Unless you have your own private postal
service, just send the letters in enveloppes that are more likely to
be processed faster and better by the triage machines*...Qualifying
the application of this rule based on practicality and common sense as
being *conservative* or *liberal* is nothing more than an
anthropomorphic projection over a simple problem.  A nice example
indeed.

My two cents over EDI...

Developers that assume their end users are shitty amateurs get what
they ask for.

This is my biggest problem with Postel's law.

It's amazing how XML on the one hand is promoted as a text format that
can be freely edited in your favourite text editor, and on the other
hand its verboseness is a godsend because it puts people off actually
doing so.

Well, no, not really. Postel's law is applicable to protocols
that have only a single version.

I think what we're talking about here, though, is the difference
between "mostly works" and "works." Did you read the link
Gene supplied?

On May 23, 10:21 pm, Gene Wirchenko <ge...@ocis.net> wrote:

Marshall