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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: xPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0 ... size increase over v1.0
 rjm@z... (Rick Marshall) writes: >My personal test of the soundness of programming languages and >techniques is that i should be able to use them without constant >reference to a manual or a "tool to make it easy". therefore i don't >use java, dislike many modern graphic environments and development >tools, and fear for the future of this great technology. In some ways I see what is happening to XML as even more difficult (and troubling) than what has happened to Java. With Java, it's at least reasonably possible to explain "Java the language" separately from "Java the libraries", though I'd probably want System.out and System.in. My Java work depends on an understanding of the language core supplemented by references to the libraries. The tools, when they help me, really only help with the libraries, and don't reach the core language - I don't trust them enough to consider that. With XML, it's harder and harder to make that separation because the tools are growing more and more intertwined. Using these specs created since the rise of W3C XML Schema (or heck, Namespaces at times) requires more than an understanding of XML 1.0 + a few reference books - it requires a clear understanding of many intertwined things which are not themselves particularly clear. I can still sort of hand developers XML + a parser and expect something good to come of it, but developers looking for anything more than that quickly find themselves in strange territory where many things look familiar but combine in unusual (and sometimes problematic) ways. Those tools and specifications (especially anything derived from WXS) look at the core XML 1.0 information with expectations derived from elsewhere, making it more and more difficult to explain the separation of the core from the supporting tools. On the bright side, reading the Web Services family of specifications brings on even more of the same kinds of despair, so it certainly could be worse. -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org 
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