Ohmigod! The web has exploded in specs and is doomed to failure! You heard it here first, bookmark this entry so you can say you knew way ahead of time. The internet and Web have no tight architecture control, interoperability is hell, bigcos are doing their usual things, there's all this crazy innovation going on, and there's a gajillion specs.
Lesse, what specs are possibly involved in deploying my whizbang site:
HTTP 1.0, 1.1
SSL
HTML 3.2, 4.0
URIs
XHTML ?
DOM Level 1,?
CSS Level 1,?
Cookies
JavaScript
VBScript
ActiveX
Flash
Java
CGI
Perl
Unix or Windows
Some database thingy, mySQL/Berkeley...
XML
XSLT
I18N
Image stuff, like JPEG vs GIF and which to use
Image software (BreezeBrowser)
Colour Palettes
Email
FTP
RSS
Wifi
TCP/IP
DNS
MovableType template language
Movable Type extensions, particularly BlackList
Can't you see? It's all going to crash! There's NO WAY THIS WILL WORK! IT'S DOOMED! We should just go back to using Gopher.
The preceeding is a sarcastic response to the various "Web services are DOA because there's so many specs" threads.
Here's a different view: the amazing amount of distributed extensibility, layered and orthogonal specifications, heavy interop testing and lots of tooling make the web workable and pay my salary.
