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

Re: Kudos on SOAP

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:9/14/1999; 8:16:46 AM
Topic:Kudos on SOAP
Msg #:10990 (In response to 10989)
Prev/Next:10989 / 10991

Thanks! It's quite interesting to sneak something on to the IETF site thru the back door.

And I had another interesting experience in this realm yesterday. I met with someone who claimed to be one of the architects of the Internet at the IETF level. He probably was, I'm not saying he wasn't, but it was a whole different world, he looked at my work from underneath, and to him it didn't look pretty. "It won't scale," he said, the typical response of an IETF guy. It's intimidating. I first heard it when I met the guys who run the servers at AOL in 1994. They talked me out of doing something that I now know would have worked.

It's happened over and over. They think I don't get it, and sure there are many things about what they do that I don't get, but I've been an active technologist and programmer for 20+ years and I haven't been sitting on my hands, I've been doing *something*. Right? Yes.

Their scaling issues, god bless them, make the Internet possible, and I thank them for that. I want to do something else, I am not trying to reinvent the Internet. What I want to do is join the Internet with tools that we love, ones they know nothing about. I watched this guy yesterday working on a web page in Emacs. Oy! He Telnetted into his server. That's nice, but.. Most people prefer a web browser interface, and might like something even nicer, like a RealBasic app or a Visual Basic app, or dread the thought, maybe even a Frontier app, a nice outliner.

Anyway, this guy didn't like XML-RPC, I think he thought I was trying to replace DNS or do multi-casting. No way. I want to move preferences between websites and connect editing tools to the web. For that, XML-RPC scales wonderfully. Get your head out of the plumbing guys. This is just like open source, where the users decided to do for themselves what the software vendors never would do for them. We will learn how their stuff works, and work our way down into their world, until they get a clue and make our stuff scale. Then we'd be working together, that's the win-win between IETF and the web developer world. Right now we're talking over each others' heads, hurt feelings on both sides. This is silly, all that's needed is respect.

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