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nostalgia (was RE: Ten new XQuery)

• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: nostalgia (was RE: Ten new XQuery)
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 10:46:27 +0100
• In-reply-to: <B885BEDCB3664E4AB1C72F1D85CB29F805C1F9A4@R...>

At 11:22 AM 5/9/2003 -0700, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
>The fundamental complaint I have about XML-DEV is that people are very
>good at generating megabytes of mail traffic about technologies they
>neither have used nor tried to understand. XML-DEV is a festival of
>cranky old men complaining about the "youth of today" and how things
>were better in the XML world in the old days. I've read the few
>complaints about XQuery & XSLT 2.0 and besides irrational FUD about
>dependencies on W3C XML Schema have failed to see any valid issues
>brought up.

The "good old days", they were very brief, and our golden memories seem to 
derive from a period when XML was defined as a process of creating smaller 
specifications that were easily implemented by graduate students rather 
than enormous specifications that take person-years to comprehend and 
implement.

It is very difficult for me to get excited about more recent 
specifications, despite having spent/wasted an enormous amount of time 
sorting out W3C XML Schema for myself.  I've put in the time and I've 
concluded that W3C XML Schema is poison from top to bottom, structures to 
datatypes, a misbegotten attempt to treat XML as if it were objects and/or 
relational database content with a tip of the hat to XML 1.0's basic set of 
attribute types and a 'mixed' feature.  Worse, W3C XML Schema seemed to 
signal the beginning of a pile-on of enormous and ever-more ambitious 
specifications.

There is still progress being made, of course, in ways that seem to build 
on what was learned in that brief "old day" period.  Perhaps there is irony 
in that work being done ISO (and OASIS).

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: nostalgia (was RE: Ten new XQuery)
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
  • RE: nostalgia (was RE: Ten new XQuery)
    • From: "Mike Fitzgerald" <mike@w...>

• References:
  • RE: Ten new XQuery, XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Working Drafts
    • From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>

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