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RE: Markup perspective not code (wasRE: Re: URIs, co

• To: 'Aaron Skonnard' <aarons@d...>
• Subject: RE: Markup perspective not code (wasRE: Re: URIs, concrete)
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Thu, 1 Aug 2002 17:03:35 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

Still not quite accurate, or at least, still too much to 
the side of the opinion that XML is too heavy for mortals.

Given editing systems that can read a DTD and produce a 
GUI, did the programmer implement that?  In the sense that 
they created a piece of code that can read the DTD and 
create the GUI, yes?  In the sense that once they have 
written that code, the author is left to create the DTD, no.

Systems like MS Access enable a person of even less than 
DePH skills to create databases and define schemas for them. 
Same difference.  

The problem here is that most XML tools and experts ignore that class 
of user.  The ones that begin to understand the role of 
the subject matter expert (can analyze the vocabulary 
domain, can analyze the business proceses that use that 
domain), will be a lot more successful than those that 
believe this is programmer work.  It was PRECISELY to 
get this sort of thing out of the hands of the programmers 
that markup was adopted by some organizations.   They needed 
a middle ground where the SME and the system could negotiate 
to produce more effective local definitions.  WYSIWYG was 
ultimately a failure; we needed the databases but we needed 
a cheaper and more user-centric way to get the data into 
and out of them.

That was the lesson of SGML.  We watched the easy to 
use tools such as SoftQuad quickly outpace the ArborTexts 
in terms of numbers of installations.
 
We watched the Datalogics go down in flames.   

We began to understand that the end-user was the SGML user.  
We kept the faith on that and some of us began to develop 
stylesheet driven systems for hypertext that let the 
end user develop both layout and tags and enabled those 
to be the same person/role or different.

It was working marvelously until the advent of the WWW, 
HTML, and the XML coup d'etat.

len

From: Aaron Skonnard [mailto:aarons@d...]

Fair enough. It would have been more accurate to say "markup users are
simply using pre-defined vocabularies *implemented* by programmers."

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