Went to SDForum’s Web Services conference yesterday. Pretty good, particularly due to Tim Bray and Adam Bosworth’s talks.

So Bosworth is consistently smart. Has been for as long as I’ve known of him. Had a lot of gems this time. He presented a grand scheme for a data oriented web built on a simple URL based query language (OpenSearch slightly extended) and RSS/Atom. Visionary stuff, very interesting.

But what I liked were his one liners, things he can say and get away with because he is who he is. Some that I recall:

“Any standard that takes 7 years to develop is a bad standard”

“The job of a standard is not to enable anything anybody wants to do. It’s to enable most of what most people want to do”

The latter is not word-for-word what he said, it’s my recollection.

If you get a chance to see Adam speak, take it. It’s worth it.