Standards

I just listened to an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. While most of the interview focused the Semantec Web, what I found most interesting, were his thoughts on Rich Internet Applications. Of course he thinks this is an exciting development, but with various technologies (Flash, JavaFX, Silverlight) competing in this space, he feels that standardization would help speed its adoption. He points to how standardizing HTML in an open and royalty-free way helped to speed the adoption of the Web.

Standardizing this technology would be a great step. Right now, these technologies run as a plugin on the browser. Once standardized, browsers could build this functionality right in, making adoption seamless. Open-sourcing the technology is not enough. The biggest problem with standardization is that it takes so long.

It's a good thought, hopefully it will gain some traction.

******

More news on the DB front. The more I delve into the database schema and the data stored in the tables, the deeper the problems run. Examining the data more closely, I'm uncovering more normalization problems that I hadn't noticed in my initial review of the schema. This is a mess!

We're using DBDesigner to diagram our schema. While the tool provides great looking diagrams, the pain is organizing the tables manually to see all the relationships. Does anyone know of other tools to diagram a schema where this is not an issue?

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