On Tue, 1 Jun 2004, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
Politics, politics, politics.
And sausage making.
Please remember that what is setting SPF above the rest has nothing to do
with the technical merits of the proposal. It is the adoption, the politics
that make it interesting.
Microsoft has the right politics for a long term infrastructure for
addressing a whole range of Internet security holes, not just this one
problem. SPF is a tactical play optimized for long term deployment.
I'd say Microsoft is irrelevant to most infrastructure issues.
I understand that at this point there are relatively few people in the
network admin community who really understand the gestalt of XML. But
comming from the program architecture world it is the alpha and omega of
future system designs.
I work with XML on a daily basis, we use it as an essential
basis of our business, it is not the ALPHA and OMEGA, and
it is not the right tool for this job.
At some point in the future all the internal interfaces of Windows will map
out to XML data structures. The same will be true of the bulk of UNIX
layered applications. There is a simple reason for this, with a modern
language like C# or the newer Java releases you can write a class 'X' and
then create a parser/generator method on X entirely automatically.
That is nice, I believe someone on the list has already written an
SPFv1->XML converter. This is all that is needed to "harness the
power".
Over time this type of functionality will become even more tightly
integrated. If you want atomic transactions on a persistent structure of
class X you will simply tell the compiler to work out how to manage that. No
more hacking about in SQL just to persist a structure with ACID properties.
This sounds a lot like marketspeak to me, all the right words
missing the point completely.
XML is the new ASCII. It will win in the end regardless of whether or not it
deserves to. Fortunately this time it is not that bad a choice.
It is that bad a choice, and XML is _hardly_ the new ASCII.
It is rather more like the new standard office document format.
--
Daniel Taylor VP Operations Vocal Laboratories, Inc.
dtaylor(_at_)vocalabs(_dot_)com http://www.vocalabs.com/
(952)941-6580x203