[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

RE: Co-operating with Architectural Forms

• To: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Subject: RE: Co-operating with Architectural Forms
• From: Frank Richards <frichards@s...>
• Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2002 10:50:06 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <2C61CCE8A870D211A523080009B94E4306DF6373@HQ5>

>>
And an ASP page complete with multiple programming
languages and syntaxes is a thing of beauty?
<<

Wow Len, you nailed that strawman. Off to the compost pile with him. If I
were to respond in kind I would suggest that you can't tell the document
from DTD.

>>
We gotta get past this "ugly" thing.  The authors
of these texts are here with us and can help sort
the English.  The editor of ISO 8879 is an approachable
guy.  We really can approach these tasks as a global
markup system task and keep all of the useful options
alive.  But if this starts out as a catfight over who
can write the simplest sentence, we are all losers.
<<

Uh, wrong. This is not in general government contracting. If the people who
have to implement specs can't understand them, the specs won't be
implemented. And having to get help from the specifiers here on xml-dev goes
against the whole idea of using an ISO spec in the first place: I and any
other geek in the world should be able to figure out how to meet a spec, and
whether an implementation meets that spec, without needing personal guidance
from the author or a separate (and specific) book from Oxford University
Press.

In my previous life as an electrical engineer I had occasion to read many
specs from  CCITT, EIA and the IEEE. (Admittedly none from ISO) Until the
8879 set of specs rises to the standard of comprehensibility set by these
organizations, rather than falling to the standard set by the USDOD
(actually below it -- you can parse a mil spec if you try hard enough. 8879
cannot be done without a gloss) those specs will, if not fail, at least be
severely handicapped in the marketplace of ideas.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Richards [mailto:frichards@s...]

>>>Can someone please explain what, exactly, are the
operative esthetic values that cause the AF solution to
be perceived as ugly?  I simply don't see it, and I've
never seen it.
<<<

Well, like HyTime and ISO 8879 itself, AFs were presented to the world in
horrible English (combining a poorly drafted statute with a needlessly
convoluted academic paper) in a vocabulary based largely on tertiary
meanings and backward senses of words. But other than that, like HyTime and
SGML, they're cool.

To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription
manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Co-operating with Architectural Forms
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>

• References:
  • RE: Co-operating with Architectural Forms
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>

• Prev by Date: XML-1.0 is dead! long live XML-1.0+Namespaced-DTD! [was Re: life support for DTDs?
• Next by Date: RE: Co-operating with Architectural Forms
• Previous by thread: RE: Co-operating with Architectural Forms
• Next by thread: Re: Co-operating with Architectural Forms
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread