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Yo' mama's non-technical aguments

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Yo' mama's non-technical aguments
• From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
• Date: Sun, 11 May 2003 11:29:01 -0600
• Sender: uche.ogbuji@f...

As it always does, I see that the defensiveness of certain folks here who are 
heavily invested in W3C has led them to substitute sophisticated forms of 
name-calling for reasoned argument.

The favorite aproach seems to be to say

"Your arguments do not sound technical to me, so they are invalid"

This facile tactic has been expressed in several different ways.  It seems 
that "is not technical" is, in this gambit, a snide synonym for "is not 
something I can agree with".

I shall try not to respond to such silliness anymore, becuase I recognize the 
game, and I have other ways to play my hand.

But I will point out that I have seen numerous technical arguments given 
against WXS, XQuery and the like here, despite the IMO disingenuos 
protestations of some (not all) in the WXS/XQuery camp, and the fact that many 
of them insist on this pretense is just more encouragement to me that I should 
not get involved in their process at all, and that I should encourage others 
not to waste time on their process.   Why should anyone spend time reading 
broken W3C specs and responding to the official lists, when some WG members  
(not all) seem so clearly bent on cynical response to straightforward 
criticism?  What makes anone think that the WGs will not just dismiss anything 
they disagree with with a flippant "I see no technical content in that 
comment"?  Soem say "the W3C won't let them".  I am skeptical of this claim, 
and though I admit that I may be wrong in that skepticism, experience on this 
list does not suggest to me that I should make the effort to find out.

For my part, if we're going to play the playground dozens, I'd prefer we 
didn't go about pretending we were engaged in genteel debate.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                    Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net    http://4Suite.org    http://fourthought.com
Is XQuery an omni-tool? - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=7620
Gems From the [Python/XML] Archives - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/04/09/py-xm
l.html
Introducing N-Triples - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-thi
nk17/index.html
EXSLT by example - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-exslt.html

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