Ben Hammersley, noting that a change in one site’s query parameters broke another’s plug-in, writes:

The trouble with small pieces loosely joined is that if one goes, the others look really silly

True enough. And since the initial site’s change actually broke Ben’s page, we can all Feel His Pain. But remember the old tightly coupled days when we thought that CORBA was going to provide the Nirvana of inter-application integration? Tight coupling works if everyone agrees to it ahead of time, but no one does, so it doesn’t.

As Jonathan says:

While the distributed, loosely-coupled nature of the web is good for innovation, the dependency on others for correct function is bad…

Jonathan concludes: “…on a personal level the interconnectedness is a mess that frankly I can’t see the end of.”

Obviously, there are ways we can make the loose coupling less fragile: registries, for example. But the Web is always going to be a little bit broken, as Tim Berners-Lee supposedly said. That leaves a whole lot of ways in which the Web works surprisingly well.

Categories: Uncategorized dw