Why the Internet is Anglican

Today is St. Georges Day, the patron saint of England, and I think its an interesting day to reflect on why the Internet is Anglican. For those of you who don't know what I mean by Anglican, its the term that refers to the many churches around the world that inherit their approach from the Church of England.

Before I explain what on earth I'm talking about, I'd like to explain what brought this to mind. I was reading Joe Gregorio's blog entry "The Atom Publishing Protocol is a failure". To summarize, AtomPub "hasn't seen the level of adoption" that Joe "had hoped to see at this point in its life."

I think this is probably common to every protocol inventor, except maybe Tim Berners-Lee, Jon Postel, and a couple of others. After all, how many protocols could be the main protocol used for everything on the Internet:

• BEEP. Well this has gone very quiet, but this used to be considered a contender.
  
• SIP. A while ago, everything was going to work on SIP - IM, Voice, Video, SOAP/SIP, the works. SIP is actually a very nice protocol for bootstrapping peer-to-peer comms.
• SOAP. Nuff said.
• AMQP. Designed to be the main protocol for everything businessy.
• XMPP. With enough extensions you can do anything.
  
• and of course: HTTP. Of course this is the protocol on which everything works. But it hasn't got complete domination yet!

Now let's go back to my analogy of churches. Most churches have a single approach, almost like a single protocol. If you go into a Catholic church in one country, its very similar to a Catholic church in another. The Anglican church is pretty unusual in that it varies massively. In some Anglican churches you can find a Tridentine Mass. This is the old Catholic service from the middle ages which until recently wasn't allowed in most Catholic churches! In other Anglican churches you will find the opposite end of the spectrum with very Protestant forms of worship.

Maybe its in the English character to have a wider, more open view - it might explain why we have a Turkish/Roman soldier (St. George) as our national Saint!

Back to AtomPub. Joe says:

"There are still plenty of new protocols being developed on a seemingly daily basis, many of which could have used AtomPub, but don't."

In my view, Joe is expecting too much. I think AtomPub is a fantastic protocol, and I see it succeeding. But I start off from a basis that any protocol that gets even a small market share of the Internet is a success. No protocol is ever going to take over the Internet, and there will always be plenty of different approaches to do the same thing. That is simply the nature of the Internet.