Whenever somebody gives you a spec for some new technology, if you can't
understand the spec, don't worry too much. Nobody else is going to
understand it, either, and it's probably not going to be important. This is
the lesson of SGML, which hardly anyone used, until Tim Berners-Lee dumbed
it down dramatically and suddenly people understood it. For the same reason
he simplified the file transfer protocol, creating HTTP to replace FTP.
You can see this phenomenon all over the place; even within a given
technology some things are easy enough to figure out and people use them
(like COM's IUnknown), while others are so morbidly complicated (IMonikers)
when they should be simple (what's wrong with URLs?) that they languish.
The beach was a beach we shall not name, because his private house
was there but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along the hundreds
of miles of coastline that runs west from Los Angeles, which is
described in the new edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
in one entry as "junky, wunky, lunky, stunky, and what's that other
word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo," and in another, written only
hours later as "being like several thousand square miles of American
Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth....
