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It is Pretty Dumb (Was RE: Not so stupid (was re: More Stupid XMLArticle

• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• To: David Megginson <david@m...>, xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2000 16:22:20 -0500

It is pretty dumb and he knows better. 

I put this one next to Dave Winer's article  
in XML Mag saying "You can ignore what they 
tell you about schemas and namespaces and 
parsers and whatever.  It's meaningless.  
If it ever gets deployed, the details will be 
hidden behind a middleware interfaces 
because basically, it is only comprehensible 
to a very small number of people who care."

Dave and Dvorak should get together and compare 
notes.  One loves XML because it is open; 
one hates it because it is open.  Should be 
a fun debate to watch.

HTML isn't going away soon.  XML saved it by giving 
it a way to live a few years longer. 

Len
clbullar@i...
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: David Megginson [mailto:david@m...]
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2000 3:00 PM
To: xml-dev
Subject: Not so stupid (was re: More Stupid XML Articles)


Bullard, Claude L (Len) writes:

 > http://news.excite.com/news/zd/001004/10/killing-the
 > 
 > This one will be believed because of the source.  
 > He doesn't even know when GUI browsers really first 
 > appeared.

Our fault, not his.  

When XML came out 2 and a half years ago, XML's promoters (W3C and
otherwise) made a Faustian bargain -- promote XML as the
next-generation of HTML (which is plainly misleading, but very
interesting) rather as than a low-level layer for serializing tree
structures in clear text (which is accurate, but boring as hell).

The HTML and Web angle gave (and still give) us a lot of positive
media exposure, but we have to pay for it sooner or later.  Every
writer cannot be an XML specialist, and we can hardly blame them --
even someone as well-known as Dvorak -- for throwing some of the
misleading information back in our faces.

I mean, let's be realistic -- was anyone going to start building a new
Web with XML and XSL stylesheets, when designers cannot even get their
minds around HTML+CSS?  If my mother wants to put up a Web page for
her church, is she going to bother with XML (unless her HTML editor
happens to write XHTML without her knowledge)?  Were merchants really
going to start posting their catalogues in XML just so that customers
could use intelligent search engines to find that someone else sells
the same blue jeans for $10 less?

We've done a lot of interesting, useful, and productive things with
XML on the server side, but they don't generally make good press.  On
the client side, Dvorak is right to complain about "XML islands" and
similar nonsense in some of the newer browsers -- after all, we
complain about them all the time on XML-Dev.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@m...
           http://www.megginson.com/

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