[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: State of browsers/JUMBO
> As a result of the lack of browsers I have spent time investigating how >JUMBO2 might be expanded to meet 'most' needs... > I have repeatedly suggested that we develop these tools communally and >have offered JUMBO on this basis. I've had a few replies, but not as many >as I would have hoped. Some observations: - I tried (more than once) downloading Jumbo and exploring what it could do for me. I didn't make much progress. There's clearly an enormous amount of functionality there, but I found it very hard to know where to start. I've had the same experience with downloads of other XML software (most recently XML Toolkit), and I dare say others have had the same experience with my own SAXON library. - I suspect that as a community the thing we are desperately lacking is a commonly understood architecture. We're all writing bits of code that do useful things with XML, but we don't have a clear vision as to what the total set of capabilities should look like or how its components should relate to each other. I think this is why it's hard to take something like Jumbo and discover quickly what pieces of the jigsaw it supplies. - Having all these people produce free software is great, but the downside is that most of it was written to satisfy the intellectual creativity and/or parochial application requirements of the individual author, which means that the boring parts of software development, like working out who the users are and writing good task-oriented documentation to meet their needs, have been sadly neglected. Perhaps this is why real product developers like Microsoft seem to be slow. Fred Brooks, I recall, said that writing a one-off program is one-tenth the effort of producing a software product that does the same thing. Regarding Simon's essay, I don't share his pessimism. I don't personally regard client-side browser support for XML as particularly urgent, I'm quite happy to do rendition server-side either on demand, or in many cases at site generation time. One reason is that the client-side model (along with XLink and XSL) seems to assume that the web of XML documents has the same topology as the web presented to the user, which I think grossly underexploits the ability of XML to separate the information structure from the user view. I think a much more valuable development would be the integration of XML with database technology. (And in practice, I'm actually using XML mainly for "EDI" style applications. ) Mike Kay xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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