[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Re: Native XML Interfaces
On 06/03/2013 12:30 PM, Timothy W. Cook wrote: > On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 8:12 AM, Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com> wrote: >>> But Andrew, maybe I include myself in that category of not being aware >>> of the APIs that are available. Could you exand on that with a couple >>> of examples? >> >> For example the dev is faced with the challenge of extracting the >> <title> and product/@id values from some xml. >> >> They could: >> >> - use xquery/xpath >> - use xom/jdom >> - use sax/stax >> >> instead they use a tool to generate an xsd from the xml, then use a >> binding tool to generate some classes, then use those generated >> classes. > > Okay, thanks. Maybe I won't include myself in that group then. :-) > That is REALLY going the long way around. It's not that far removed from database engineers whose worldview includes SQL, period. Their solution to adding 2+2 is to create a table with two fields, populate them with the value 2, and then write a stored procedure to query it, extract the values, and add them together. There are real-life examples of this I am sure we could all share; perhaps at an evening session at Balisage :-) but it's not just an education problem: it's both conceptual and perceptual. The dev|eng|prog or whoever (remember the DPH?) has a set of working tools, as we all have in our own field. Their perception of information and information-manipulation problems -- and ours -- is conditioned by their familiarity with their tools ("Nail Hammer Soup", as Len said) and with the types of information they regularly deal with. Introduce pointy brackets, and you are adding a new concept for which they have no tools. Provide training, and they will see that there are tools to deal with pointy brackets. But unless you also deal with the connection between conceptualisation and perception, they will still see the pointy-bracket world as another, perhaps interesting, parallel universe to the one they regularly work in. The only connecting tissue is the information itself. "Getting" XML involves a different way of conceptualising information for them. For people who work in the rectangular-data world, where everything is a table, XML consists of two object types: elements in element content, and character data (read: fields and values). The messy and infinitely plastic world of text documents and mixed content and recursive nesting just looks to them like a cat got a fright in their database schema. If you then try to extend "getting" XML to the ordinary author (my own hobby-horse) who is *not* a dev|eng|prog|dph but a professional equivalent in another field (a chemist, perhaps, or a political analyst, or an accountant, or even a PHB), there is a great deal of uncommon ground which is simply missing in their experiences. They have a screw, but they have never come across a hammer, let alone a screwdriver; in fact they only have a child's toy for making farm animals from modelling-clay. There are lots of paradigms for native XML interfaces, and we here are all in a position where we could adopt or adapt them to do things the way we want, pointy brackets and all. Many of us do this already, some of us for a living. But THE challenge is to make a native XML interface that the wordprocessor user with a requirement to generate semantically-reusable XML can use without being aware of it. That means NO pointy brackets in sight. Ever. Really. Most documents (and users) in the Real World[tm] don't need this: the documents are transient or ephemeral, and a wordprocessor or wiki/CMS editor will do just fine, even one which uses XML to store the ephemera. For some value of "most" -- my gut feeling is around 98%. For the rest, there are some things that can be done to adapt the interface: Xopus has already implemented a few of them. The real question is, is that 2% big enough numerically to justify the investment for a business to do the job and do it right? Or for an Open Source project to take it on? ///Peter
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