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RE: is that a fork in the road?

• From: "HUGHES,MARK (Non-HP-FtCollins,ex1)" <mark_hughes@n...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2001 14:43:13 -0700

Bullard, Claude L (Len) [mailto:clbullar@i...] spake:
>What have we learned from XML's success? 
>That the job wasn't done well enough to 
>support the follow-on requirements. 

  If it is a success, by definition it did the job well enough.  I
highly recommend reading Richard Gabriel's article:
<http://www.naggum.no/worse-is-better.html>

  Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

>Success?  Everyone can use <...  ...="..." />. 
>Whoopee!  Try to connect the dots and see 
>what happens.  That minimal victory bites.

  Welcome to real-world XML, where that minimal victory is *enough* for
a great many applications.  Actually, many don't even use attributes.

  And you know what?  We've built a lot of Neat Things with that minimal
format.  And they work.  People use them all day, every day, solving
real problems.  To many of us, XML is the best thing since ASCII and
RFC-822, when it's kept just as simple as those.

  Almost nothing has been built with the more complex stuff, almost none
of what has been built works, and none of the complex stuff that works
is used by anyone.

  So, forgive me if I have a hard time seeing any problems "connecting
the dots".  Perhaps you can explain that in more detail, proving the
coming infocalypse resulting from not using more complicated XML
techniques?

-- <a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>

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