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RE: FWD: Markup-language joke

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: FWD: Markup-language joke
• From: "DuCharme, Bob (LNG)" <bob.ducharme@l...>
• Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 10:31:25 -0400

I'm a fan of robotwisdom.com, but without mentioning him by name, I've often
used Barger as a case study of someone who really doesn't get XML because
it's gotten too popular. He sees people who use XML as the hammer to too
many variations on nails, and it doesn't work well for his variations on
nails, so he comes to the conclusion that XML is badly designed. In his case
(not a direct quote, but a summary of his attitude) "XML is terrible for AI
work! What were the people who designed XML thinking?" 

He keeps complaining, but he keeps coming back (e.g. posting to
comp.text.xml, apparently). Search
http://www.robotwisdom.com/log2002m06.html for the word "mistake" to find
his detailed, out-of-left field complaints about an O'Reilly quotation of
the XML FAQ.

(By the way, anti-XML anti-SGML people must be awfully clever if they can
hack into a theater's projection system so "quickly.")

Bob DuCharme          www.snee.com/bob           <bob@  
snee.com>  "The elements be kind to thee, and make thy
spirits all of comfort!" Anthony and Cleopatra, III ii


-----Original Message-----
From: akmal @ city [mailto:akmal@s...]
Sent: Sunday, July 14, 2002 5:00 PM
To: xml-dev@l...
Subject:  FWD: Markup-language joke


Hi All,

Just saw this on comp.text.xml, posted by Jorn Barger:

<quote>

An SGML fan, an XML fan, and an HTML fan are watching a movie when they
notice smoke coming out of a trashcan.

The SGML fan says "We must convince the theater management to hire an
expert to write a DTD for emergency-announcements, and sell them an
expensive application for archiving announcements, and get them to hire a
team to convert all their old announcements to SGML!"

The XML fan says, "There's no time for that!  We must train all the
audience members to recognise XML, and then start a committee to
investigate the possibility of starting negotiations to form a working
group to write a paper on the future evolution of emergency-announcement
semantics!"

Meanwhile, the HTML fan takes out his wireless PDA and types in:

  <h1><blink><font color=red>FIRE!</font></blink></h1>

which he quickly hacks the digital projection system to display, saving
the lives of everyone in the theater.

the pragmatic web: http://www.robotwisdom.com/web/pragmatics.html

</quote>

--
akmal chaudhri

IBM developerWorks - http://www.ibm.com/developerWorks/
XMLDatabases ------- http://www.btinternet.com/~xmldatabases/


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