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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Does WTSIWYG make simplicity moot? (was Re: dtds
 That's it. More assistance; fewer surprises. 1. Visual interfaces are productive. No contest. 2. Visual interfaces can be obstructive. Anyone who works with Intellisense has seen times when autocomplete features bypass the eye. The hand can be faster leaving invalid syntax behind. Quotation autocompletes are another notorious one. The best Viz systems catch these early. Unfortuntately, some leave them behind so depending on them is as dangerous as children who think spell checkers relieve them of the need to learn to spell, calculators of the need to calculate, and so on. We never lose the need to eyeball the syntax and mentally run the productions. 3. The most productive language for the most people is Visual Basic. The IDEs are a great help to those that need it. As Tony Coates says, not all people are solving tricky problems all the time. In fact, most of them aren't. They have specialized in one or two products doing a handful of tasks and that is the daily grind that pays the bills. A lot of XML-Dev cognoscenti are toolbuilders and they are exceptional. That also means they are a significant but small minority. 4. Abstractions of languages ARE where the visualization is important. XML Schema Basic is probably not tougher to learn than DTDs. On the other hand, if XML Schema Basic were all I needed, I'd stick with DTDs for the obvious reasons. XML Schema abstractions are tough to learn, take practice to apply (or we wouldn't have that big best practices page), and so far, the tools are buggy, and do disagree on interpretations of the spec. Therefore, one ends up with multiple tools and tests against them all. XML Schemas aren't simple. Fact. Most of the tools are expensive. Fact. One can't force a class to buy tools for the class that exceed the cost of the class. Fact. Like it or not, PFE (my preference), Notepad, VI, are here to stay. They are also free, and as one who does not drink port, that leaves even more spare change for new guitar strings, the only habit I have in common with the Cisco Kid. DTDs are here to stay. They may be applied to large jobs less than we once did, but they won't die off and the competent XMLer learns how to apply them. Tools don't make them go away. In Pam's case, the XMLValidatingReader class supports them; so .NET includes them and she has a way to work with them, all from an OK But Not Great visual programming environment. Tilt away, folks; the windmills don't care and Dulcinea remains an ugly maid. Back to Fox and dreams of C#. len From: Rick Jelliffe [mailto:ricko@a...] Putting cost aside, one benefit of direct manipulation interfaces is in presenting information in views that allow better physical manipulation. 
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