doug miller emailed me about this entry#

he saw that i said i thought it would've been nice as a youngster to have more of the things i used have programmable components and that I also wrote that it would be nice for users to not have to care about what kind of syndication standard a site was using. he writes: ''I understand what's being said in these two bits, but I can't help marvel at how developers can often seem to be talking out of both sides of their mouths. On the one hand, a programmable component is good, and encourages those so inclined to explore and develop programming skills. On the other hand, if programmatic elements are exposed to users, the developers have failed.''#

doug worries that ''what'll end up happening is some VC or other suit will take this position to mean "users shouldn't be able to programmatically access the mechanism of our publishing tool's Atom/RSS mechanism" and seek to create just that scenario'' - and to give some foundation for this as a valid prophecy he says, ''MT is owned by VC's now, Blogger is owned by Google, and Atom is in bed with IBM. It's a damn shame that developers, in their ever-present quest for more elegant engineering solutions, feed right into the schemes of the suits to capture and make proprietary once free means of personal publishing. Nobody *means* to do that, but developer's own disdain for understanding how business works feeds the process, over and over again.''#

doug has a good point. there is something that seems like a battle going on between the engineers and what we'll call the "usability experts." the battle is, engineers want there to be power and configurability, and usability experts want things to be "As Simple As Possible, But Not Simpler" - you see this whenever someone write Don't Make Me Think! - so it's programmers who want power that create BloatWare - and many people see programmable elements the worst kind of bloatware. even though they don't like other people's bloatware#

so the question becomes, "How do we provide power and simplicity at the same time?" I can't really think of a real application that I can point at to say "This one does it right" but the ethereal concept of the "Semantic Web" is really an attempt to answer this question. The Semantic Web tries to create a web of information that is easily machine parse-able and easily machine presentable in any form. it's way for everyone to benefit from availability of information and it allows those who are inclined to care about the technology to be able to at an equal footing.#

Standards in general are the answer. And it's even better when business people understand and care about both business and technology, because they can make money without doing evil to their users and the public at large.#