Most people know Parkinson's First Law, which states that work expands to fill the time available. Fewer people have heard his Second Law: "Perfection is achieved only at the point of collapse." Based on my own experience, this is a fundamental rule of software. By the time a language or application does everything that its users want it to do, it has become so complicated that it is starting to fall apart. I was reminded of the Second Law while reading Creating Applications with Mozilla, by David Boswell, Brian King, Ian Oeschger, Pete Colins, and Eric Murphy. As the blurb on the back cover says, Mozilla is more than just a browser. It is a complete application framework built on JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), an XML format for specifying GUIs called XUL, another XML format for binding actions to components, and a new component model called XPCOM. This is all very cool, and I'm sure each element's existence can be justified, but the result is significantly more complex than other systems that achieve the same ends.
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机译：大多数人都知道帕金森第一定律，该定律指出，工作在不断扩展，以填补可用时间。很少有人听到他的第二定律：“完美只有在崩溃的时刻才能实现。”根据我自己的经验，这是软件的基本规则。当一种语言或应用程序执行其用户希望它执行的所有操作时，它已经变得如此复杂以至于开始崩溃。 David Boswell，Brian King，Ian Oeschger，Pete Colins和Eric Murphy在阅读《用Mozilla创建应用程序》时使我想起了第二定律。正如封底上的说明所说，Mozilla不仅仅是浏览器。它是基于JavaScript，级联样式表（CSS），用于指定GUI的XML格式（称为XUL），用于将操作绑定到组件的XML格式以及称为XPCOM的新组件模型的完整应用程序框架。这一切都非常酷，我敢肯定每个元素的存在都是合理的，但是结果要比达到相同目的的其他系统复杂得多。
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