{"id":642,"date":"2005-01-24T10:17:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-24T14:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/wp\/2005\/01\/24\/less-options-good\/"},"modified":"2005-01-24T10:17:00","modified_gmt":"2005-01-24T14:17:00","slug":"less-options-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2005\/01\/less-options-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Less options = good"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dehora.net\">Bill deHora<\/a>\ncomments on\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mnot.net\/blog\/2005\/01\/23\/terminology\">Mnot&#8217;s latest<\/a>, saying\nthis about something he heard somebody say;<\/p>\n\n<blockquote>\nHe has a nice comment near the end on how having less options can be a good thing.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>I didn&#8217;t hear the interview, but yah, absolutely.  It&#8217;s arguably the\n<em>fundamental theorem of design<\/em> (<em>all<\/em> design, not just\nsoftware design).  But we should be careful to clarify that it&#8217;s &#8220;less\noptions&#8221; of form, not function.  That is, by constraining form we&#8217;re\nonly limiting <em>how<\/em> solutions are developed, not <em>what<\/em>\nthose solutions are capable of doing.  I think that if the point was\nbetter understood by Web services proponents, we would have made progress\ntowards decisions\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/2002\/09\/Blog\/2005\/01\/19#2005-01-buh-bye-props\">like this one<\/a>\n&#8211; which constrains form by virtue of\nrequiring all identifying information in a single data element, without\nconstraining function &#8211; a long time ago (and arguably never have bothered\nwith Web services at all).<\/p>\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve been heard to explain my transition from being a CORBA proponent\nto a Web proponent in these same terms; that I in a\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.xent.com\/FoRK-archive\/may98\/0120.html\">gestalt moment<\/a>\nin 1998, I realized that the Web was, more or less, &#8220;distributed objects&#8221;\n(&#8220;identifiable things on a network that you can chuck messages at&#8221;) with some\nadditional constraints on form.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bill deHora comments on Mnot&#8217;s latest, saying this about something he heard somebody say; He has a nice comment near the end on how having less options can be a good thing. I didn&#8217;t hear the interview, but yah, absolutely. It&#8217;s arguably the fundamental theorem of design (all design, not just software design). But we [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}