[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Myths and Misunderstandings
I seem to have been removed from distribution, probably because of the bounces. I've tried to correct that in this old NS3.01 browser I use at home. God bless egroups. Anyway... David Barnes asks: >>does the transmeta chip/concept have a better standing? I don't know, David. One might say it is less dangerous given the lower market penetration. I don't have the facts about what either chip is designed to do for XML except what is on the Intel pages. I want the same answers for both. The question is simply should the hardware vendor pick the "main" application languages for XML. It is not something I want them to do since it corrupts the local contracting processes. IOW, give me an accelerator where I can configure it based on the negotiated document protocols (and I do mean human in the loop negotiations) and I am happy to use this tech. Make that Intel or transmeta's choice and I have exactly the same situation as a bundled browser. I may indeed wish to use CommerceOne or Ariba languages, but that is a local choice. Intel doesn't get to choose. If they do, we're back to the DOJ trying to figure out what all of this means. I was just amazed that people were more concerned about a SNAFU in the Washington Post than a decision by Intel. That is what I meant by 'snake brain': the fight or flight reaction that is so easy to program and so hard to unlearn. Yes, it is important that information published be correct, but we have tolerated a lot of incorrect information about the origins of XML and its antecedents. It is improving. I had fun sitting down this week at Barnes and Nobles going through all of the XML books to choose one to recommend locally (I chose Professional XML from Wrox) and for the most part, the descriptions are now a *lot* better than they were a year ago. Part of that is the error corrections on XML-Dev which are "an inestimable service". OTOH, some of the comments were still dang near absurd. Many reflect a desire to shape the myths about the origins of the web into politically convenient forms: o TimBL was unaware of the hypertext research of other developers. Please. That would not convince me that he is a genius; it would tell me he missed the part of school that teaches research before implementation. or to propagate a good practice that is only a practice, not a rule. That is the icky stuff that becomes superstitious engineering. o XML separates presentation and content. No it doesn't. It enables that. OTW, XML doesn't care. It's a syntax. There are other parts of *the system* that make that a good thing to do: eg, the DOM. This is one of the collection of myths entitled The SGML Way which were once darlings but in some ways, self-destructive. We have to be careful here. Sometimes you need to mix presentation and content. SGML didn't teach that either; SGMLers did. Mythmaking is part of marketing: brochureBrouhahas. It is worth a private note, but not a public beheading. As for me, MS makes a lot of neat technology. Gotta love their programmers even if you want to take the short sword after their managers. "All politics are local." The web is an amplifier. The interface is a behavioral shaping mechanism. They operate at the level of the snake brain, shaping behavior by repetition of reinforcers that create chains of Stimulus/Response - Consequent. If that is the level of learning one needs, use it, but there is more to benefit from self-selection as long as one understands the limiting factors of the loop between self-selection and environment that drive the evolution of both. Only human reasoning based on verifiable, testable, facts can make *just* decisions, one brain at a time. In a firestorm of signals, we have to train ourselves to pick out the important ones; otherwise, we are left to the leadership of "important people who talk to important people" and that inevitably leads to what a friend (Newcomb) has quoted another (Pepper) as describing "a dictatorship in support of a plutocracy". It is conformism (as Jeliffe says) but to what or who? Trust yourself to choose and be ready to be very provoked if someone considers it their choice to choose for you. If Intel lets me choose the language, I am happy for the performance boost. If not, maybe transmeta will. Choose. len http://fly.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/lensongs.ram Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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