Re: comment about gnome architecture

["Curtis C. Hovey" <sinzui cox net>]

On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 04:33, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On 16Dec2003 09:44AM (+0100), Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > 
> > I don't understand your opinions on this. A bad spec is as bad, or worse
> > than some bad software written without a spec. This is obvious, since
> > there will be software written against the bad spec, and software
> > written with no spec could become software written against a good spec
> > if the software was good and someone documented its behaviour as a spec.
> 
> Working on a web browser I have also learned that the existence of a
> bad spec can inhibit the creation of alternative good specs.

I totally agree.  the only value I can see for a bad spec is that it may
start debate for a good spec.  If software and data is written to bad
specs, it may add years to the effort to move to a good spec.  I'm not
say we need a perfect standard, but we do not want a bad standard at
all.

1. Consider how difficult it was for Microsoft to move Windows/DOS users
to NT/XP because of poor driver specs like vxd that were too expensive
for manufactures to move away from.  It took 10 years, and many steps,
to move to a good standard, and many of the step were compromises were
only moderately better than the last.

2. <font> and <center> tags forced upon the Web community by Netscape
were superseded by CSS 7 years ago, but I still see new Web developers
using concepts they should never have learned.  Worse still, these young
developers provide the same week arguments about the need to make data
that is viewable in a minority of ancient browsers. 

3. Consider the difficulties we now face because X was a good standard,
but doesn't meet our current needs. It now hinders us moving to a new
architecture because we have too much invested in a standard that wasn't
regularly checked and adapted to our needs.

-- 
__C U R T I S  C.  H O V E Y____________________
sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.