Umm.. I don't think the intent is conspiratorial; the 
notion they do this sort of thing by careful calculation 
seems to be a bit that way.  AFAICT, the web for awhile 
was just a tsunami of ideas and half-baked implementations. 
Then the forty somethings arrived and brought a deep 
background into minutiae that few had considered or cared 
about much.  Then when they did begin to care, they 
had to rearchitect the ideas and put new names on them. 
Now we have half-baked implementations and a lot of 
orphaned ideas living in foster homes with parents 
that don't care as much where the idea grows up as 
long as they get the check from the agencies.

Given that even more cynical scenario, I am glad to 
see guys like Elliotte sit down to see just how 
far one can get with an underwhelming proposal. 
I think the only conspiracy of complexity I see is 
the natural one when lots of chefs get together 
to create a buffet.  It can become wasteful of 
ingredients and fattening for the customers.

Will they abandon it once the job is done?  Sure. 
They are there to sell software.  It is up to us 
to become smart enough to know when to keep our 
wallets in our pockets and out of reach.  But even 
minimal profiles are pretty much for us geeks. 
What about the people who actually buy things?

Again, something I asked awhile back: get the 
vendor to show you things that can't be done, 
or can't be done as well or as cheaply using 
ASP, HTML, and basic scripting.  IOW, take XML 
completely out of the picture and what is left? 
Now how much XML do you need to do the rest? Ok, 
of that, how much framework is needed for that?

I suspect the footprint gets a lot smaller.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Champion [mailto:mc@[...].org]

9/23/2002 5:09:48 PM, "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@[...].com>  wrote:

> Umm... that's pretty conspiratorial.  Lots of forces 
> can drive complexity into a system.

Just a reminder/disclaimer, I was not the author of that bit, just forwarded it
to the list.

I do agree that the *intent* was probably not conspiratorial.  Still,
I'm very afraid that the *outcome* will be much as Ari noted:
"the winner will throw away the specs it used to win the battle."

<MyCanonicalRantYouAreAllSickOf> 
The way to avoid that scenario is to use the minimum "profiles" of the
specs that can be understood by humans, coded by hand, and explained to
non-geeks.
</MyCanonicalRantYouAreAllSickOf> 

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