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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Creation vs. Long-term Maintenance of Declarative Language Scripts
At 00/08/25 16:39 +0200, Eric van der Vlist wrote:
>While I foresee a wide opportunity and generalization for the usage of
>XSLT transformations, I don't think that the development of such
>transformations will take a significant part in the costs of development
>and maintenance.
Bingo, Eric! Thank you! You've identified the biggest problem.
What is the length of time to develop the first version of a stylesheet (or
a DTD, or any file in whatever declarative language you care for) compared
to the time taken to maintain it?
Even if you don't write the file yourself ... if you contract the initial
creation of something and you are left with the maintenance, your WYSIWYG
tool must be able to accommodate a declarative script written by
hand. ***AND*** your WYSIWYG tool must be able to accommodate the
subsequent writing or maintaining a script by expert hand without
interfering with previously embedded comments, constructs, additional
information, etc.
>Compared to the costs related to the design and content creation of a
>site (or of an IT system), I strongly believe that it's not significant.
Agreed!
Plus, consider how much of maintenance depends not on the constructs used
in the declarative language, but in the comments, the documentation, the
flow diagrams one may edit into their file to help the maintainer, etc., etc.
I feel that skill and customer satisfaction should be measured *more* by
how successfully the customer is going to work with the results supplied by
a craftsman than by the initial task being solved in the first place. The
craftsman may have changed employers, may be too busy to help, or may have
taken up glider building instead of IT (a good friend left the SGML
business to build gliders in his garage) ... where is the customer then?
The same goes for the tool itself as what I just said about a craftsman.
If the WYSIWYG tool does not successfully mesh with the needs and practices
of the craftsman, then the WYSIWYG tool is not meeting *all* of the
customer's needs. I've seen WYSIWYG tools marketed solely based on getting
people started using a declarative language, which is fine for doing just
that, but the users don't think to look in the long term or in the bigger
picture. And neither do many tool manufacturers (or at least their bosses
who won't fund the programmers who are creating the tool to properly
research the needs of the craftsman!).
Anyway ... sorry to get carried away ... this has been a sensitive issue
for me since 1993. :{)}
.................. Ken
--
G. Ken Holman mailto:gkholman@C...
Crane Softwrights Ltd. http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/x/
Box 266, Kars, Ontario CANADA K0A-2E0 +1(613)489-0999 (Fax:-0995)
Web site: XSL/XML/DSSSL/SGML services, training, libraries, products.
Book: Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath ISBN1-894049-05-5
Article: What is XSLT? http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/08/holman
Next public instructor-led training: 2000-09-19/20,2000-10-03/05,
- 2000-10-09/10,2000-10-19,2000-11-12,2000-12-03/04,2001-01-27
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