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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Does WTSIWYG make simplicity moot? (was Re: dtds, schemas,xhtm
 11/11/2002 12:07:00 PM, "Anthony B. Coates" <abcoates@T...> wrote: >For the 80/20 things that most users need, W3C XML Schema is no harder to teach >than DTDs, if you are using a decent WYSIWYG Schema editor like XML Authority or >XML Spy. Let's get away from the olde world charm of fireside discussions over >port debating which schema language is easiest to write and maintain using vi or >Notepad. The world has moved on. I've been muttering to myself about this all day, but couldn't come up with a pithy response. Fortuitiously, Joel Spolsky addresses a very similar subject on his weblog today - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html [in a very slightly different context] "In teaching someone about COM programming, it would be nice if I could just teach them how to use the Visual Studio wizards and all the code generation features, but if anything goes wrong, they will not have the vaguest idea what happened or how to debug it and recover from it. I'm going to have to teach them all about IUnknown and CLSIDs and ProgIDS and ... oh, the humanity!" Sure, the Wizzy IDE's can handle the simple cases, but "oh, the humanity!" when things start to get complicated or the un-stated assumptions are violated. Throw newbies with some training in the fundamentals out of XML Spy and ask them to deal with DTD (or, hopefully someday, RELAX NG) then they have a reasonable hope of figuring out what's wrong and fixing it by hand. Throw just about ANYONE out of Spy when the going gets tough and force them to confront some of the more exotic bits of W3C XSDL, and they'll be howling for blood. As usual, Spolsky puts it extremely well: "Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don't save us time learning." The world has moved on, alright ... down the road to hell :-) 
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