On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 02:58:03PM -0500, Meng Weng Wong wrote:
| On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 07:51:48PM +0000, Mark wrote:
| |
| | Also, I am beginning to get worried. Over the last few days, one person
| | after the other seems to pop out with yet another brilliant idea to redesign
| | major parts of SPF from scratch. We should be focussing on getting SPF
| | adopted, and writing support tools for it, instead of starting each fresh
| | day with a new round of re-negotiating that which we already agreed upon
| | earlier.
| |
|
| Most of those people are actually me, and I'm just transmitting an
| alternative design philosophy from a Major Player Who Shall Not Be Named.
|
| I believe that it is important to take opposing ideas for a test drive
| before discarding them. Most of the time you come away firmer in your
| beliefs. Sometimes you change your mind for the better. Either way you
| win.
|
| Ultimately I think it comes down to different cultures. XML in DNS is
| not acceptable to the culture that reads Slashdot, runs Linux, and
| discusses standards openly on mailing lists. XML in DNS is a brilliant
| idea in the culture that controls the market for MUAs on the desktop and
| redefines the technology landscape on a regular basis.
That's not exactly true. In fact I find quite often the reverse. Some of
the strongest advocates of XML are found on Slashdot.
XML in DNS, or DNS in XML, or whatever, is fundamentally silly. There needs
to be some core capabilities, and DNS is part of that. Certainly many things
like complex eye-candy MUAs need large amounts of complex hierarchical data
for many things they do. Some centralized depository of such data is of great
value for such purposes. Making it a universal namespace like DNS is would
also be a nice idea. But the core DNS needs to keep apart from XML itself.
Some basis system need to be, and stay, clearly pre-defined. XML does not
work that way.
Some XML advocates want XML everywhere. They want XML to replace all the
config files of every program. They want XML to replace all the system
startup scripts in Unix. The want XML to replace all programming languages
including assembly. They probably want a CPU that executes XML directly.
Next thing you know they'll want to replace ASCII with XML.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Phil Howard KA9WGN | http://linuxhomepage.com/ http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/ http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
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