Can contracts survive in the grassroots ecosystem?:

Interfaces that are XML-based and schema-backed can lay a kind of contractual foundation for layered extensions.[…]

Formal contracts aren’t just stabilizers, they’re enablers. If documents were predictably structured, for example, we could visualize their change histories in even more compelling ways.[…]

Contracts are awkward beasts, and they generate a lot of friction. Of course, some friction is a good and necessary thing, but if we can’t make contracts easier to use, the grassroots ecosystem will continue to route around them. And that’s not in anyone’s best interest.[…]

More like this in Recipes for remixers

This column suggests making the implied contract between a Web application and its human or robotic user into something more explicit.

Quite frankly, I don’t yet see the legal subject matter. But I’ll keep reading.