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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Parents and children (was RFD: comp.text.xml)
 <PHILOSOPHICAL> len bullard wrote: > > Umm... press in the web is a taken for granted thing now. As for > SGML, check the references in the early part of the decade including > a whole issue of Byte. And even another misleading Economist article! And articles in PC Magazine, etc. > > This doesn't mean that SGML is evil incarnate - it just means that > > it involved a learning curve that many people found less than exciting. > > So does XML. I think once it is out there awhile, you will get to > endure that as well. You see, SGML did not start out with that > reputation. To me, this is such a crucial point that it deserves re-emphasis (and re-re-emphasis). XML inherits 95% of everything that made SGML difficult to apply and use. Not 95% of what made it hard to memorize the SGML standard, but that was never relevant, because only one person ever memorized the standard (at which point, presumably, SGML got boring and he moved on to other things). But 95% of the stuff that makes SGML hard to *use* is in XML. The flexibility, the dangerous parameter entities, the responsibility for defining your own tags, your own stylesheets and your own systems. The responsibility to define standards and stick to them. The perceived and real need to bend them. It's all there. Compared to HTML, XML is rocket science, just as SGML was before it. The Byte/Salon/comp....html backlash is a re-occurrence of a very old, very boring phenomenon. Generic markup makes people's lives harder (in the short term) in several ways. People have enough on their plates without digital elites trying to shove down their throats complicated, multi-layered junk that makes their lives with the promise that it will have long term benefits. The best (only?) way to get past that is with instant feedback, immediate gratification software. Using XML for designing data protocols provides pretty immediate gratification, which is why it has taken off in that capacity. On the other hand (and perhaps this is heretical...sorry), the data protocols world got along okay without XML in the first place. I have personally documented some interesting applications of XML to software interoperability problems, but they are essentially incremental changes: a more expressive IDL, HTTP with richer objects, and so forth. XML makes these things easier, but not fundamentally more powerful. In my opinion, XML's real power remains in the ability to make persistent data truly persistent -- across technological sea changes. XML browsers will one day provide more or less instant gratification for Jane Schmoe. She will still have to endure an extra level of abstraction, understanding and responsibility, but at least she can have her web page up and running in an evening. At that point, SGML/XML will have really rounded a corner. Right now, it merely seems to have done so, because it is the media's interest to promote it as such. And of course it will be similarly in their benefit to report and perhaps exaggerate the backlash. Luckily, people are willing (for now) to believe us that we will one day provide them with more interesting, interactive web pages. This is in large part because it is in the media's interest to promote that vision with us. I hope we do not keep the webmasters waiting so long that they start to disbelieve. Considering that the browser vendors cannot even implement CSS right, I sometimes have moments of shaky belief myself. Without the browsers, XML is a programmer's toy and we must begin our long, slow climb to usability again. Still, with Netscape's source available, we should not be subject to their whims anymore, so I am not too worried. In the meantime, if you teach XML, as I do, I would suggest that the closest thing to instant gratification we have today is Jade+Docbook for XML. Creating a series of web pages and a nice printed document from the same source file is pretty damn cool and much more exciting than looking at the output of a parser. <ASIDE> It will neither help nor hurt pedagogically to admit that these tools comes from the days before XML, and has been updated for the "Web generation." You can let your interest in history be your guide on that issue. Personally, when I teach Java, I like to remind my students of its (partial, indirect) roots in Lisp (among other languages). I say: give the devil his due. He may not turn out to be as evil as you thought he was. </ASIDE> > In my view, they are the same thing and that is a good thing. If > we have to accept that our *standards* are the product of > The Director's approval, and that only the elect can know > the shape of things to come such that a Don Park doesn't even > have half a chance to compete, then it is time to go back to > playing guitar for happy hour crowds. It is something I > understand and can see the good of doing. It wasn't so long ago that we were having a similarly pessimistic conversation about web standards (at that time, HTML and CSS) and you admitted that despite all of the setbacks, it was a good time for hypertext. That is more true today than ever. XML may still be due for a backlash, but lights are going on in people's heads all over the place. As long as the pattern is two steps forward, one step back, we are still making progress. </PHILOSOPHICAL> Paul Prescod - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco "Perpetually obsolescing and thus losing all data and programs every 10 years (the current pattern) is no way to run an information economy or a civilization." - Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/10124.html xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... 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