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Simon St.Laurent wrote: > To the extent that programmers have influenced the development of XML > since version 1.0, I think the impact has been severely negative. Bray responds" "Too simple I think. Particularly given that almost all of the advantages of XML over SGML were based on the principle of "leave out everything except what programmers actually understand and use." Too wrong headed I think. XML takes a perspective that the only users of markup are programmers, and given the DePH, bad ones at that. It failed that test. SGML took a view that the end users of markup are authors and that programmers earn a living making the end users job simple enough to understand and easy enough to do. It succeeded but it irritated the programmers who are usually a bit egotistical. The truth was somewhere in the middle but varies by time and location: err... representation. It might have been a good idea to get more representation for authors on the ERB. Why not? Programmers can't speak simply enough for the authors to understand them and the authors can't speak precisely enough for the programmers to take the time to listen. Not a new story for committees afraid of Internet Time. Skonnard writes: "I agree with Tim here and have a hard time seeing how XML is a useful *technology* to anyone but "programmers". Users of "markup" (who are not devs) are simply using pre-defined vocabularies defined by programmers." Programmers are not the only designers of vocabularies. In fact, that was a big mistake to assume in the SGML days and now. Subject matter experts learned DTDs quickly. The trick was to get them to work with the programmer such that what was designed was implementable. Statements like "only programmers know this stuff" is how I know that an egotistical programmer without a lot of experience is doing the job. Programmers make a lot of subject matter mistakes once they get into content markup and away from presentation markup. They don't understand the semantics of the terminology and usually make godawful simplifying assumptions on the way to hardwiring the code to their assumptions. "Nodes is nodes, properties is properties. Tell me who gets to names the names so we can get on with business." XML won't kill markup singlehandedly. It will require the help of the hubris of certain programmers. len -----Original Message----- From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@t...]
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