Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...> > I still don't count myself an XML expert after five years in this > treacherous muck, and I certainly wouldn't count anyone who had taken, > even passed, a test offered by IBM as an expert. On the other hand, without certification schemes to provide a basic QA that your human is up-to-speed, it is difficult to imagine that the current generation of XML tools can get much deployment -- the 2003 generation (Office 11 etc) will have the same problem that the products of the previous product cycle (the B2B bubble) had: not enough skills to take maximum advantage of it. I had do some consulting for a financial institution a couple of years back: they wanted to move all their parameter entities of their acceptance-testing DTDs into a single big file because of performance reasons: they felt they were not technically competent at that time to write a little caching entity manager which would have actually fixed their problem. To me it seemed a trivial matter: after all, that is what Open Source software, which they were using, allows; but to them it was "just one more thing." Certification by reliable bodies is the only way an exploding technology can be taken advantage of, for many companies. I used to teach SGML courses and then XML courses, and I found the XML students had very different mental furniture to the SGML students, which I think Simon also points out in this thread. I have found that people who learn XML on-the-job often have very great deficiencies: I think the areas of namespaces and encodings are the two that most commonly seem to stump people (or where they blaze ahead wrongly). I guess what would be great would be a WebStandards project to certify the certificates! Cheers Rick Jelliffe
|
