https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16246665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16246665 DonHopkins on Jan 27, 2018 | parent | next [–] One major problem w

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16246665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16246665 DonHopkins on Jan 27, 2018 | parent | next [–] One major problem with Ted's design is that it wasn't simple enough to support multiple compatible implementations. I'll repeat the James Clark quote from the wonderful DDJ interview that I posted to the other discussion about Ted Nelson: There's a wonderful DDJ interview with James Clark called "A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML" where he explains how a standard has failed if everyone just uses the reference implementation, because the point of a standard is to be crisp and simple enough that many different implementations can interoperate perfectly. A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML: https://web.archive.org/web/20210323210832/http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-on-m/184404686 https://web.archive.org/web/20210323210832/http://www.drdobb... "The standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple implementations." -James Clark More details and excerpts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217622 >Here's another comment I wrote in the HN discussion from a couple years ago about "Ted Nelson on What Modern Programmers Can Learn from the Past [video] (ieee.org)", in which James Clark talked about his role in the transition from SGML to XML, and the value of standards being sufficiently simple to have multiple interoperable implementations: [...]