Response to Bob Wyman’s response on Canter’s Law #1
Bob Wyman of PubSub left this comment on Phil Pearson’s blog (after Phil blogged my Law #1):
It bothers me that so much of this “format war” revolves around concepts like “making someone happy.” Perhaps I’m just an old fart, but what I was taught at DEC back in the 70’s and 80’s was that the number one rule for *everything* was “Do the Right Thing.” Making people happy is a good thing, if you can do it while doing the Right Thing. But, if you focus too much on making some geek happy, the result will NOT be the “Right Thing” from the users’ point of view. Making one or two geeks happy is not the Right Thing if it means compromising on how well users’ needs are addressed. There are many more users than there are geeks. We need to be driven by a drive to service our users’ needs — not by the egos of geeks and coders.
bob wyman
So here’s my carefully crafted response:
So Bob - are you saying that rdf is the right thing or the wrong thing. And what about OPML? Right or wrong? Microformats? Atom? Which is it - Bob?
Which is right or wrong?
Just asking you this question points out that one person’s right is another person’s wrong. One could try and craft a format - as you have done with Structrued Blogging - that attempts at providing a hybrid set of functionality - but that becomes a new format itself and one could then argue - a personificatoon of your ego - thereby further stoking the format wars.
Or one could say “fuck it” - let the best format win. But let’s get completely away form finger pointing, name calling, ego battles and chest thumping. I say let the solutions and the marketplace decide.
No product or service we create will ever take sides. That’s just stupid.