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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | GISList: Re: Effective Standards |
| Date: |
04/24/2003 04:55:01 PM |
| From: |
Paul Ramsey |
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Dimitri Rotow wrote:
>> Sure it is. Standards take incredibly much longer to establish than
>> anyone would consider reasonable from a technical point of view.
>> There is such
>
> I'd disagree. Standards that are effective and make sense take off
> like wildfire - look at the use of mp3's to swap music, for example.
> On the other hand, I would agree with you that bloated, inefficient
> standards that make life difficult for users and serve only to
> protect the commercial interests of legacy vendors do take incredibly
> much longer to establish.
Interesting point, per usual. And an interesting example. In the recent
era, it might be argued that standards which are accompanied by an open
source reference implementation take off extremely quickly. Where would
XML be without the early availability of Expat? Where would MP3 be
without the ISO reference source code? Provide an open source
programmatic interface to the standard capabilities you want to provide
and you are off to the races. I don't care about the Java RMI wire
protocol language, because I can just call RMI functions. I don't care
about the Oracle SQL*Net protocol because I can just call C functions.
If OpenGIS wrote a binary client/server specification that included a
BSD-licensed reference implementation library it would be immediately
(a) useful and (b) used. All this hooey about XML/GML being "human
readable" is irrelevant in the presence of a useable (and implemented)
API. If you leave the implentation of things solely to vendors they will
botch it up (accidentally or on purpose), and defeat your aims.
--
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| Paul Ramsey
| Refractions Research
| Email: pramsey@refractions.net
| Phone: (250) 885-0632
_
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