[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: The Legend of 'View Source'
I believe you start from a faulty premise. I've never heard anyone claim that "view source" is needed for any markup language or general technology to become popular. However I have heard the claim that it is important that the "view source" principle be maintained for documents on the Web. This is something that from practical experience I agree with a 100%. My first personal homepage was created primarily via doing "view source" on a fellow student's webpage and then editting it until it looked OK in IE. My first RSS feed was obtained by doing "view source" on the Sam Ruby and Don Box's RSS feeds. Reading your rant, I am confused. I'm not sure what "view source" has to do with XSLT or RDBMSs though. ________________________________ From: Danny Ayers [mailto:danny666@v...] Sent: Tue 7/8/2003 4:22 PM To: Xml-Dev Subject: The Legend of 'View Source' Q: How do people learn markup? A: 'View Source'. This notion is one of the big guns that gets wheeled out in many permathreads - 'binary XML', 'RDF, bad' perhaps even 'XML Schema, too complicated'. To a lot of people it's the show stopper, the argument that can never be defeated. Not being able to view source is the reason format X died; being able to view source is the reason for format Y's success. But I'm beginning to wonder if this argument really holds water any more. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it certainly used to be the case, that many people here got their initial momentum into XML by looking at that there text. I'm also sure that being able to view existing source can be a great aid in learning a markup language. What I'm questioning is whether the actual practice of 'View Source' really is so widespread these days, and more importantly whether it offers such benefits for it to be a major factor in language decisions. I'd be happy with the answer to : are people really using 'View Source' that much? I hear it a lot, yet see little evidence. One big source of doubt for me is what many markup languages look like these days. Pick a few web pages at random, and 'View Source'. Chances are you'll see a morass of different languages : HTML, Javascript, CSS. Does this really offer significant benefit to a newcomer? On the more current sites you'll see a load of <div>s and class='s. Do these really compare with the <table> and <font> in terms of see and tell? There are also the bits and pieces of XML that can be hard on the eye : CDATA blocks, escaped characters, entities and good old namespaces. Ok, I know there are people present that don't approve of XML namespaces, but if anything their (alleged) inelegance is another case *against* 'View Source'. Namespaces are there out in the wild. There certainly are languages around that succumb nicely to exposition-by-'View Source'. SVG is a good example - the elements have human-friendly shape names, the structural grouping seems intuitively right and the painter's model (layer on layer) fits well with our idea of document order. But take a look at XSLT. How much does the source alone tell you about what's going on? There are constructs that look familiar from procedural languages, but how much will viewing source help a C programmer grasp the idea of declarative programming? Implicit in the 'View Source' argument is the assumption that somehow the source will convey information on levels above and beyond the syntax. Sure, if the element is called <table> there's a big clue about what it might mean. But might not this be a dangerous assumption? It's easy enough to misinterpret things, but if the hint looks explicit, then isn't any erroneous interpretation going to be held that much stronger too? If a furniture designer sees the element <table>, they're not likely to consider the number of columns but whether it's pine or mahogany. Apart from confusion between apparently human-friendly terms, there is also the often opaque, arcane language that creeps in - what's this 'arcrole' business then, guv? Certainly people can learn different human languages based primarily with the bits-on-the-wire of speech. No manual is needed. There are polyglot illiterates. But there is more in the learning process than just a plain-text stream. Other people act as validators, giving complex vocal nuances and visual feedback. This isn't just on the syntax/grammar level either. Bits-on-the-wire and/or syntax are necessary, but it's naive to consider them sufficient. Think I'm stretching a point here? Ok, move up the document to xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml". How many hits a day does that URL get thanks to 'View Source'? Turning the other way for a moment, in some XML discussions one might start to believe that 'View Source' was a necessary precursor for persisting data. Yet there's no 'View Source' on the contents of an RDBMS. A side issue here is the possibility of another kind of misinterpretation. If the XML syntax is a serialization of a different kind of model than is being expected, then the misunderstanding can be systematic. I know RDF/XML is considered an edge case around these parts, but confusion caused by viewing it as 'just another XML syntax' is common. This is fundamentally the same kind of confusion that people seeing XSLT as a procedural language suffer from. Personally I suspect that we're going to see a lot more XML used as a view of more complex model than simple hierarchical data (Coo-ee, XQuery!) One last point, I think we should be clear about what is and what isn't 'View Source'. If I need an XSLT stylesheet the first thing I'll do is open an existing stylesheet and copy and paste half of it. Then I'll get Michael's reference off the shelf. I bet a fair few folks here have the bare-bones HTML 3.2 document etched into their lower cortex. But I'd argue that nothing is actually gained from 'View Source' in this, all it is is templating, the fact that it's a text format isn't of immediate relevance. It isn't cut and dried, never is. That 'View Source' should be respected for it's work in the past, and its utility in certain kinds of simple data languages isn't really in doubt. I just don't think its tenure is beyond question. Cheers, Danny. ---- http://dannyayers.com PS. There's a little irony here - I sent this message last week to what I thought was xml-dev, but was actually the OpenOffice XML list, somehow listed in my contacts as Xml-dev. I cocked up - if only I'd viewed source! --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@x... For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@x... ----------------------------------------------------------------- The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>
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