Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

What is Scripting News?

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:8/18/1999; 7:23:34 AM
Topic:What is Scripting News?
Msg #:9626
Prev/Next:9625 / 9627

With the two developments today, Microsoft's announcement that they will release a spec for their IM server, and James Spahr's announcement of XML-RPC for AppleScript, it finally occurred to me that we have achieved one of my goals for Scripting News.

My goal

I didn't just want a site that reported on what's happening in the web development world, I wanted to create a place where web development happened.

A place where people learn from each other and build on each others' work.

We believe in the Web

Unlike other development groups, we do our work on the web. I think that encourages a sense of discipline, it's not as easy to write a web page as it is to write an email. There's a sense that your comments are more permanent. And there's an organizational structure to hang stuff off of, and that organizational structure can evolve.

For example, consider two sites we launched in the last few months, www.xmlrpc.com and www.outliners.com.

Each of them is a group of people, with widely different skills. Outliner people are thinkers, writers, planners, organizers; and XML-RPC people are the most serious modern bit-oriented web developers. But there's an intersection of interest between these two groups. The XML-RPC guys build systems that will be used by the Outliner people.

On the XML lists they try to crack the nut of giving XML development tools to writers. Wrong! Give them outliners, and build your systems out of XML, but the XML must be hidden from the writers. Look back at this message two years from now. I'm sure this is right.

Let's do more!

Anyway, now that Scripting News is blooming, let's do more! We can grow. There are more projects and more connections. I'm glad you're all working so well with each other. The comment by David Carter-Tod was wonderful! Yes, now we do connect systems at a system level. Let's do more of that. Erase the boundaries, make the Internet stronger, make the individual platform vendors woo us. More open specs, fewer SDKs.

I think we're getting somewhere. Thanks to everyone who participates in making Scripting News such an interesting place!

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