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----- Original Message ----- From: "Steven R. Newcomb" <srn@c...> To: "Nicolas Lehuen" <nicolas.lehuen@u...> Cc: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>; "'Jeff Lowery'" <jlowery@s...>; <xml-dev@l...> Sent: Friday, January 25, 2002 10:33 PM Subject: Re: AF and namespaces, once again (was Re: There is a meaning, but it's not in the data alone) > > Disclaimer : I just read David Megginson's > > documentation of XAF [1], which implements a subset > > of AFs for XML. I'll try to read [2] in the future, > > especially for the meta-DTD part, but right now my > > brains just melt at the idea of reading a document > > which calls its sections 'subclauses'. Apparently > > those people like giving complex names to trivial > > concepts :P. > > It's all in the interests of precision and clarity. > > In my 16 years of standards work, I've learned that if > you want a standard to work, you have to think like an > engineer. But if you want it to be adopted, you have > to think like a politician. The two mindsets are > sometimes incompatible. Where they were incompatible, > I've generally chosen to make the standard really work, > in preference to early, easy adoption. For me, it's a > professional thing. > > The other approach, however, tends to enjoy quicker > success. It is not an accident that the notoriously > vague French language is the traditional language of > diplomacy. For some reason, vagueness is generally > more palatable. I regret that the precise language > that I, among others, have labored to produce is so > off-putting for so many people. I know no other way to > make a standard that can withstand the stress of > implementation and deployment, while actually meeting > its original requirements. Wooops I should have made sure that none of 'these people' were reading the list before writing that :P. I've received a few private answers due to this remark, so please accept my apologies if I offended anyone. My point was just that I was looking for a introductory document to AFs and found that the difference between David's very practical introduction [1] and the original specs' extensive use of never-seen-before terms [2] was quite amusing. After sending my mail, I did find an introductory article by W. Eliot Kimber [3] which was referenced on xml.com's resources on AFs [4]. For my defense, may I cite Mr Kimber ? "Like any formal mechanism, the SGML architecture mechanism has its own jargon, which while internally consistent, may not always be intuitively descriptive in a general context." That was exactly what I meant. Best regards & my apologies, Nicolas [1] http://www.megginson.com/XAF/ [2] http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/wg8/docs/n1920/html/clause-A.3.html [3] http://www.isogen.com/papers/archintro.html [4] http://www.xml.com/pub/rg/Architectural_Forms
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