[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: A simple guy with a simple problem
Yes. We can only make it work for the average idiot and the common-sense engineer. The extraordinary idiot or the relentless expert beats us almost every time. What makes web spec work so difficult is because there isn't one customer, one market, or one set of requirements. One dares to do less because it is actually really *dangerous* to do more. The freaking thing is an amplifier and if you turn on the power with the pots wide open, the feedback tears the speakers out of the stacks. On the other hand, when you need a big system and a lot of watts, you should know to turn it up one pot at a time and keep a hand on the Big Switch. We can't do specs like that. There is no Big Switch. Our problem is this is the first time we've had an amplifier this big. All the concepts of experience from previous work informs our designs, but the scale of the dammed thing defies any prior experience. We can experiment, but to what degree does the experimenter get access to the microphone? Compete or negotiate? Compete and negotiate? Who knew the remains of the Soviet army would turn to blackmail using the WWW once sensitive very valuable information was placed on it? Some things defy our best efforts to guess and they are usually things we never thought would be an issue. Oddly, it was the inability to secure the Internet completely and just that potential from the east that scared the bejeebers out of my CALS cohorts ten years ago. When they saw the WWW design, they began to drop over dead like mine canaries. Their dieing word was: competence. So, back to schemas and the infoset. If schemas do less, will they do enough for everyone? I don't think it is realistic to answer that here. Given any situation, a bad practice or a bad hair day will change the answer. But best guess? Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@t...] Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2001 3:04 PM To: Bullard, Claude L (Len); Sean McGrath; xml-dev@l... Subject: RE: A simple guy with a simple problem At 01:42 PM 14/03/01 -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: >So to ask as straight man: > >Why does XML have a feature that permits >a "bad practice"? Any tool powerful enough to be useful for professionals is going to be powerful enough to be dangerous when used improperly. E.g. there are lots of examples of bad practice that can produce poor results with chainsaws, procedural programming languages, and 18-wheeler trucks. The alternative - not having them - is unacceptable. <nostalgia>Anyone remember the person worrying out loud here about the "billion laughs" self-exploding XML instance?</nostalgia> -Tim
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