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RE: constructive (was RE: Markup perspective not co

• To: "'Simon St.Laurent'" <simonstl@s...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: constructive (was RE: Markup perspective not code)
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2002 10:38:57 -0500

No, but tools that enable people to sit down in rooms 
and document the results of their negotiations in the 
forms of machine-processable understandings is a boon.
Unless you are in a closed system of one authority, you 
cannot escape the negotiation toward final fixed forms. 

All Bosak is doing is precisely what SGMLers have always 
done:  organizing the selected names.   The problem of 
adding the programmers is that suddenly, XMLers want 
to define what the names mean too.  Implementing what 
they mean is a different task, and very programmer 
appropriate.  Strangely, that was almost the Hytime 
problem too.  The names of the names used to name 
the names became very obscure and that stifled the 
conversation like a fart in a crowded room.  MMTT.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@s...]

At 08:39 AM 8/4/2002 -0400, Didier PH Martin wrote:
>You know its easy to say, they are wrong when in fact we (and mostly the
>W3 organization) created the situation. Its probably time to take some
>responsibility of the consequences of the XML community actions and ways
>of thinking. I know its not popular to say that :-)

I'm not sure why creating XML "created the situation".  Before XML, 
developers had to think about how to exchange and store their information, 
and after XML, developers still have to think about how to exchange and 
store their information.

The only thing that's changed is a common syntax (now markup) for some of 
that information.  I don't see how that creates a responsibility for markup 
to do the rest of a job that properly belong with developers close to the 
specific tasks that need to be solved.

Perhaps in the enthusiasm about solving one problem (syntax) some folks 
thought that they weren't going to have to work anymore, but I don't think 
that's a problem for XML.  Instead, by attempting to solve all these 
developer problems, something you apparently want to continue doing, we've 
added all kinds of new problems to XML (and the W3C's use of "XML" in spec 
names adds to the perception that XML itself has the problems.)

It's time to stop solving developers' problems generically, and let them 
solve the problems themselves building from only a basic syntactic 
framework - if and only if the framework is appropriate to their 
problem.  XML is not a magic wonder-glue for programming.

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