---
title: Ordinary People
categories:
- work
content-tags:
- code
- development
- design
---

Great quote from [Tim Bray on the "View Source Lesson"][1]:

> At this point, the RDF evangelists pipe up and say "Well, Ordinary People (tm) don't have to look at the source, there will be tools to sort all that out." Sorry, I just don't believe that. If, in 1994, you'd needed DreamWeaver or equivalent to write for the Web, there wouldn't be a Web today."

   [1]: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/21/RDFNet

That last sentence succinctly expresses an intuition I've had but not been able to articulate.  There's something critical about not relying on end-user tools to make a technology approachable.  This is why I like XML-configured tools like [Ant][2], and was suspicious of the early-day dreams of how [Struts][3] was going to make front-end development a drag-and-drop operation.  Thankfully (for the fate of that framework) it is still quite usable without depending on the rapid development tools everyone was talking about on the lists in Y2K.

   [2]: http://ant.apache.org/
   [3]: http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/

As Jon Udell [paraphrases][4] Dave Megginson: the formats that tend to succeed are those optimized more for humans than for machines.

   [4]: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/12/09.html

Microsoft, on the other hand, has such a strong market position that they are able to put tools first; their developer community will simply wait for Redmond to introduce a new version with the latest feature.  Macromedia was so far out in front with Flash that SWF gained a similar position, poisoning SVG.  I still believe it is a mistake, though, for anyone without such a position to rely on applications to expose an accessible interface.
