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.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

>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: [...]