This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 21 Mar 2008, by Egon Bianchet.
This always reminds me of something that Ben told me years ago: you can’t craft lenses (thus polish glass) with a single abrasive powder, you need at least two different ones. Why? because no matter how fine and well operating, a single abrasive has specific properties and will create specific patterns on the surface. You won’t see the patterns but the result will be not perfectly smooth. Two different ones will likely remove each other patterns. The more different abrasives you use, the smoother the surface will become.
Which is why both email and the web are such an incredibly messy yet magnificently interoperable systems: their standards are constantly under the action of many different abrasive agents (on both sides of the production/consumption barrier), each one using the surface of interaction with the rest and therefore polishing it by usage/friction.
The result is incredibly polished (where for “polish” I mean “able to allow a huge variety of players on both the producer and consumer side of the interoperability equation”), but also incredibly inertial.
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