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Indeed, less rigidity and higher tolerances lead to reliability - similar to what we do in construction of buildings: a skyscraper would fall one day if it wasn

Indeed, less rigidity and higher tolerances lead to reliability - similar to what we do in construction of buildings: a skyscraper would fall one day if it wasn't for its flexibility under effects of elements such as wind.

naasking 7y ago
That's not an apt analogy. A system with tight tolerances can still be flexible, we just know more precisely how it can flex and when it will break. A better analogy would be if your construction workers didn't have standard or prescribed bolts in their design, so they just take what's lying around and hammer and weld bits together until it seemed sturdy enough. Suffice it to say, this is not a recipe that would work to build today's sky scrapers. There is considerable design and sanity checking that goes into this stuff which the web at every point completely lacked. XHTML was a promising start in the right direction, but they unfortunately bungled it.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  If you treat the browser as the skyscraper and web pages as environmental conditions, the approaches look more similar. In that analogy, XHTML is weather control satellites.
9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y ago
Interesting related trivia: engineers build safeguards around that flexibility - in the same way that a poorly built bridge will shake itself apart in the wind, a building without adaptive dampening or the right properties of flexibility could shake itself apart in the wind.
- dnautics 7y ago
  The inherent presumption is that software engineers are engineers in that sense of the word. How I wish more were.
  - pas 7y ago
    In my experience clients make business decisions that trade-off reliability, robustness, high-avaibility, etc. all the time. Because they can. Just look at the F31, recently they opted to "test in prod" for a lot of components. And not because of the engineers/developers. Were it a nuclear reactor control software they wouldn't have decided that way. (Hopefully.)

naasking 7y ago

That's not an apt analogy. A system with tight tolerances can still be flexible, we just know more precisely how it can flex and when it will break. A better analogy would be if your construction workers didn't have standard or prescribed bolts in their design, so they just take what's lying around and hammer and weld bits together until it seemed sturdy enough. Suffice it to say, this is not a recipe that would work to build today's sky scrapers. There is considerable design and sanity checking that goes into this stuff which the web at every point completely lacked. XHTML was a promising start in the right direction, but they unfortunately bungled it.

maxerickson 7y ago
If you treat the browser as the skyscraper and web pages as environmental conditions, the approaches look more similar. In that analogy, XHTML is weather control satellites.

9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y ago

Interesting related trivia: engineers build safeguards around that flexibility - in the same way that a poorly built bridge will shake itself apart in the wind, a building without adaptive dampening or the right properties of flexibility could shake itself apart in the wind.

dnautics 7y ago
The inherent presumption is that software engineers are engineers in that sense of the word. How I wish more were.
- pas 7y ago
  In my experience clients make business decisions that trade-off reliability, robustness, high-avaibility, etc. all the time. Because they can. Just look at the F31, recently they opted to "test in prod" for a lot of components. And not because of the engineers/developers. Were it a nuclear reactor control software they wouldn't have decided that way. (Hopefully.)