Well, I was/am _NOT fighting_ against content negotiation -- it's better
than nothing at all, I just WANT _a choice_ to _stay legal_ when the
negotiation is not worth the trouble -- some people tend to take it to the
extreme. I just raised some points in response to a specification of a
negotiation protocol, I'd like to make them clearer:
1) Content negotiation is useful, but the current proposal can't solve
the partial implementation problem. e.g., Mosaic X11 2.5 vs. Mozilla
1.1b1.
2) Content negotiation is a general way to solve compatibility problems
-- but it should not be the _only_ way/choice -- there are times
table compatibility problem can be solved trivially, if we apply
the plain old net wisdom.
What bugs me most is that some influential people seem to be making every
effort to get rid of the plain old net wisdom (section 2.2 in the current
HTML 2.0 spec). I want the old net wisdom/common sense to stay!
>soon, though!), but you should still be able to hack up a CGI script to
>look at the HTTP_ACCEPT envvar).
You know most clients these days send Accept: */*
>>>only when your projects reach a certain size. Until then, you don't
>>>see the point, and it's hard for others to explain it to you.
>>
>>I happen to understand this (I think :). As I see it, the history of
>>software engineering is a evolutionary history of management of dependency
>>and reusability. What purists can't see is that there is a trade off
>>between the scale/granularity of abstraction and the cost of abstraction
>>maintenance.
>
>"Abstraction maintenance"? I'd argue that inabstraction results in far
>higher amounts of work to maintain.
OK, it seems I need to explain the trade off here. Common sense/grandma
told me that I should not put all the eggs in one basket. Does it mean I
should put every egg in a basket of its own? Common sense is dead here?
>I guess I've run out of energy on this topic. Maybe this is one of
>life's "either you get it or you don't", a fight that can also be
>portrayed as "old guard vs. new energetic upstarts" or "conventional
>wisdom vs. new thinking" or "efficacy vs. correctness", and those are
>argumental dead ends.
Again, dubious/irrelavent analogy. I (was not|am not|will not be) an
extremist. I take "the middle way". And I don't want extremists/purists
take my choices away. Is it clear enough?
-- Luke Y. Lu mailto:ylu@mail.utexas.edu/ http://www.utexas.edu/~lyl/