Cowtrails and standards

Comparing these two, the first thing you'd notice is that cowtrails are easier to follow... while standards give a sound base.

If you have to implement a service which conforms to a standard though, you need to have something readable, and standards, while normally explicit, don't necessarily go into much detail about the philosophy or thought processes behind them. I suppose there's the expectation that, if you're reading this standard, you're already "there".

I'm not sure about anyone else, but I found, despite comments like "you don't want to know WTF we were thinking" that getting some idea of these thought processes was useful. Admittedly, my experience is limited, and I've heard various comments about the Z39.88-2004 being over-engineered... but once I saw some of the stuff by Jeff Young on his Q6 blog, OpenURL 1.0 made sense.

Cow trails and standards (prelude)

Just when I'm getting my head around something, I hear that what I've learnt could quite likely be irrelevant... such as OAI-PMH (OAI-ORE) and this:

"I have little doubt that Atom, a more widely supported specification than OAI-PMH, could supplant OAI-PMH, and I think that would be a good thing. Why? Because we could begin to see a dismantling of the silos that hold “library” or “archive” material on the web and keep it distinct from all of the other great stuff on the web."
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pkeane/2008/06/26/oai-ore-atom/

Thankfully, @pkeane has promised an update on this... it's going to be interesting to see how our perceptions change over relatively short periods of time (there's always disruptive technology running amok somewhere).

Also via twitter, (love the way you can talk to anyone - easier than on the street!It's a pity you only get to overhear some of the conversation though be nice to have more of the threading made obvious ala NNTP/newsgroups):

Roderic Page made the comment that "Trick is to have people use it, so that the links get out in the wild" - I'm not sure exactly what this was referring to, but it made me think about standards and cow trails... (now I just need to untangle my thoughts about this...).