[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] What do XML consultants actually do?
"Don Park" <donpark@d...> writes: > Maybe we live in different worlds. Based on experience, > companies starting to adopt XML typically hire XML consultants > to design their systems. Most of them are not confident that > they know all the details of XML and thus are compelled to use > outside help. God! If I were paid to help people figure out XML syntax, I would be way, way, way, WAY overpaid. What companies hire consultants for is to help them understand how to exchange and process information: 90% of the complexity comes from the nature of the information they're trying to model and the business environment in which they work, 9.9% of the complexity comes from finding, learning, and integrating the software components, and perhaps the remaining 0.1% has something to do with the syntax of the markup layer (but probably not). If we switched to LaTeX, or S-expressions, or structured RTF, the only difference would be in the availability of off-the-shelf software components and training materials. The hard part is figuring out how to manage the open exchange of news, music data, maintenance information, magazine archives, or what-have-you, not learning where to stick the angle brackets. I have billed many thousands of hours on XML projects to large and small companies, and I have never once sat down and taught XML syntax, nor can I remember if I have ever (in an XML project) said or heard the phrases "DOCTYPE", "XML comment", "processing instruction", "notation", or "unparsed entity". I fully expect the techs with my customers to (a) learn basic XML syntax on their own by spending a couple of hours with a tutorial or (b) simply ignore it and trust the libraries, depending on their needs. If they're totally lost, I give the the URL of Robin Cover's XML Web Page [1] and tell them to get back in touch in a day or two. > Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised to see people start using > comments for some new standard. Removing the comment feature > will force the people to treat comment as first-class information. With luck, the Infoset will help avoid this problem by specifying that comments are not a required part of the Infoset. All the best, and good luck with SML, David [1] http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/ -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ 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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe 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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