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> Good. We can deal with that in v2.0. There are many, many examples of v2.0 standards that, although better in every respect, never actually supplant v1. v1

> Good. We can deal with that in v2.0. There are many, many examples of v2.0 standards that, although better in every respect, never actually supplant v1. v1 has immense inertia. It's not all as willy nilly as it might seem. W3C standardized the parts they could without painting themselves into a corner and wisely factored out the part they couldn't. There is an official W3C hosted registry of methods, each with a specification. They vary hugely in purpose, quality and applicability, all of which will eventually determine their viability. There are at least 3 based on the Bitcoin ('btcr', 'ion' and 'stack') block chain, for example. Which, if any, of these should W3C prefer? The fact of this Cabirian explosion supports the W3C argument. Not selecting some arbitrary subset of these as SHALLs in the v1 standard affords room to discover the benefits and pitfalls given time and iteration. I can understand the viewpoint of Mozilla, Google, et al. I'm sure they'd love to throw a room full of coders at a simple specification and knock out a planetary scale identity system, collect a few billion names and sell all that info to the highest bidders before the next quarterly report. It seems that W3C has other ideas about how this should work.

DannyBee 4y ago
Yes, v1 often has immense inertia. This is true, but it will actually not make you any better at predicting the future, and as i said elsewhere, we are extremely bad at that already. Step into the shoes of a developer 10 years ago, and look the world now. Look ohw much is changed in a way that would affect this stuff. Trying to have successfully anticipated it simply won't work. Instead, you build standards to be easy to transition from/to. That is what enables you to upgrade standards and get reasonable adoption of new versions. While painful, that is the only path that ever works.

DannyBee 4y ago

Yes, v1 often has immense inertia. This is true, but it will actually not make you any better at predicting the future, and as i said elsewhere, we are extremely bad at that already. Step into the shoes of a developer 10 years ago, and look the world now. Look ohw much is changed in a way that would affect this stuff. Trying to have successfully anticipated it simply won't work. Instead, you build standards to be easy to transition from/to. That is what enables you to upgrade standards and get reasonable adoption of new versions. While painful, that is the only path that ever works.