Dear GIS World: You're Not All That

This is what I get for not writing my GIS and APP post yet, but our friend Sean Gillies has said it now.

Dear geospatial community, please do not propose yet another special protocol until you can demonstrate that Atom won't work.

In fact, I'll be rash and extend this pox to just about every protocol ever proposed by the GIS community. What in the heck were you thinking — and I'm looking squarely at you, ESRI? Database connections just weren't good enough for you, so you had to invent Geodatabases? I'm not talking about data formats; raster and vector data has special requirements. But let's stop the custom protocol madness. Let's all talk native database connections and HTTP.