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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: RE: Painful USA Today article (was RE: AN N: R E
 That's fine as long as you have a plan to cope with unknowns (what you don't know) and unknown unknowns (what you don't know you don't know). That plan may be anything from start over to fail. "Fear is the mindkiller" as Herbert wrote. Still, if you stick to a small problem everyone has and solve that, you have a least made a lot of people more productive. If you try to solve everybody's problems with one solution, you are likely to have mostly dissatisfaction. But until you can think through precisely what the problem is, this advice won't get you far. XML could be simplified because SGML was already done. Building a simple thing first to solve a ubiquitous problem is quite difficult. You have to be very precise about the problem. XML is what it is (1.0) because that can solve one problem shared by many people: a syntax for transporting data objects better than delimited ASCII. Once past that, the numbers of problems solved effectively appear to diminish proportional to the number attempted by any one application. This is one reason to get nervous about those who want to consider the syntax merely a serialization of the InfoSet-spec'd properties. It looks reasonable but notice the problem definition just changed. Try this. Make a list of all of the XML applications and XML systems you use. Next to that, put a short but precise description of the problem to which it is applied. The first problem is working out what is an XML application vs an XML system. Note how often you are depending on concepts such as the InfoSet vs how often it is just syntax and known names and value spaces. When is it useful to have a schema? We think we understand all that and some do, but that was the kind of thinking that went into simplifying SGML. I wanted to get rid of parameter entities, myself. Some said they couldn't maintain complex DTDs without them. I said, maybe complex DTDs are the problem that preserves the problem. Point of view.... len From: Rex Brooks [mailto:rexb@s...] Is there something inherently wrong with just proceeding to start small in scope and do what you can do well as you can as long as it allows for further development and doesn't box you into a corner or add so much computational overhead that it becomes unuseable? 
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