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RE: is that a fork in the road?

• From: Mike.Champion@S...
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2001 14:46:48 -0500

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@s...]
> Sent: Friday, March 02, 2001 12:57 PM
> To: xml-dev@l...
> Subject: is that a fork in the road?
>
>
> Maybe I've just read too much of XML-Dev at one gulp, and I
> certainly come  to this with my own strong set of opinions, but it feels like
> something different is afoot.  Not necessarily the inevitable march of complex
> solutions to solve complex problems, either.

I've had similar feelings lately (although I missed a week of XML-DEV last week, so maybe the cause is the same).  In the "SML" debates a year ago, I had the sense that lots of hard-core XML geeks really understood the big picture, and the "simpletons" were only arguing that it shouldn't be *necessary* for everyone to understand the more obscure bits of XML to move forward with it.  Now I sense serious frustration as another year has gone by without a Schema Recommendation, widepread uncertainty, confusion, and contention about what "post-schema validation info sets" mean even among the geekiest of the XML geeks, and no public complaint as new "standards" efforts splinter off from the W3C (e.g., TREX and JDOM).  In other words, I'm getting the sinking feeling that it's no longer *possible* to understand the big picture.

I think there's widespread agreement as to the broad outlines of a solution -- refactorization, simplification, modularization...  My all time favorite XML-DEV post came from Tim Bray in early January (see http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200101/msg00248.html): "the lesson the Web teaches, reinforced by XML, is that the way forward lies in Daring To Do Less". 

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