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Re: reaching humans (was Re: Extract A Subset of a W

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: reaching humans (was Re: Extract A Subset of a W3C XML Schema?)
• From: james anderson <james.anderson@s...>
• Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2003 02:15:37 +0200
• Organization: nil
• References: <r02000000-1026-E093B245C3AF11D794470003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>
• Reply-to: james.anderson@s...

"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
> >markup is also cool for separating data and processes that act on that
> >data. yes, it's pretty heavyweight and there's all kinds of more
> >lightweight data interchange formats, but XML has got all this inertia
> >behind it and really great toolsets. Otright disparaging the use of
> >markup for purely machine communication can't be mainstream either. As
> >long as you can pay someone (or get paid for) debugging a bunch of
> ><UDWhatever_22> tags, then fine -- you get to use all the fancy APIs.
> >Why is this bad? Purely maintenance, IMHO.
> 
> It's bad for a number of reasons.
> 
> First, lousy markup design - for that's what I'll call it - sets bad
> precedents for people.  If all I've encountered is <UDWhatever_22>,

if all you encountered was "<UDWhatever_22>", then you were not reading very
carefully. the question was about dependancy, not exclusivity.

>   and
> that's what I think XML is, I'm liable to run like hell rather than deal
> with XML unless I'm paid an awful lot.  (That's my general response to
> RDF/XML, and apparently it's not an unusual reaction.)
> 
> Second, that kind of markup is only useful until we can't find the
> documentation any more.

aren't the document definitions an integral component of the document?

>   For cases where the documentation is always
> going to be absolutely positively necessary, maybe that's fine.

where i to be confronted with the mountain of data in twenty years, i'd much
rather find document entities full of <UDWhatever_22> and one document
definition which mapped the canonical terms to some discursive definitions,
than endless documents full of ideosyncratic generic identifiers and one
document definition which mapped one vocabulary to the canonical terms.

ymmv.

> 
> Third, you're accepting all the costs of markup - text processing,
> verbose descriptions, etc. - and getting only a few of the benefits.

is /@ that much more difficult than / ?

>    If
> machine to machine communication is all you care about, there are much
> more efficient yet still interoperable ways to do it.  Momentum's great,
> until the wave stops and you're left on a barren beach, far from the
> next potential improvement.
> 
> Fourth, you're pretty much declaring that your markup is only to be
> handled by trained professionals.

how does that follow from reversing the dependancy?

...

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    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

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