[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: seduced by markup
On 11/15/2013 04:32 PM, Steve Newcomb wrote: Thanks, Steve. I guess Pete's dichotomy of pot-smoking hippy vs. OCD might not have a category for you! I was merely pointing out that there are markup dogmas and there are programming dogmas. Both are probably born out of valid concerns. I do agree that human concerns are often more important than efficiency or processing concerns, but human concerns are also often petty and/or political, and sometimes need to be informed by practical considerations, like ease (or possibility) of implementation given a set of constraints.On 11/15/2013 03:29 PM, Michael Sokolov wrote:There's [obsessive-compulsive disorder] stuff in the XML world too, and it was there right from the start, it just has a different flavor: DTD. The whole "DOCTYPE must be conveyed with the document" religion created the concept of a document that isn't complete without being processed by its accompanying DTD. The result is a programmer's nightmare, but makes sense to a certain kind of document purist.You can call me disparaging names like "document purist" and "OCD sufferer", but I have quite a different perspective on these things. The W3C completely misunderstood SGML's single most important feature when they dismissed the DTD formalism from their thinking about XML. The DTD syntax was never about machines. It was about human beings, and it is still, even today, and as crummy as it is, the most humane way available for human beings to communicate about data design in a diverse collaborative environment that inevitably must include non-programmers. It was, and it remains today, a fantastically costly error to think that software could ever fill the role that the dread <!DOCTYPE... *still* plays in the real world. Whose software? Running in whose environment? Who gets to edit the product of the discussion? What is the tangible form of the product under discussion? How do you phrase a question that was unanticipated by any software's design? How do you train every stakeholder in the deep magic of the software, sufficient to allow everyone to pose a problem or solution? Summarize conflicting positions? Craft a technical solution to a political problem? Create a technically stable, predictable, toothy agreement out of chaos? Do eye-parsing in a fractious, sweaty committee environment, so at the very least everyone can plainly see what they're arguing about? Consider what would have happened if, even as little as 2 years ago, all the stakeholders in the ACA rollout were given 6 months to agree on the structure of the information that they were supposed to interchange, with the result being a set of DTDs. I claim that today, at the very least, we would all know exactly who the actual sabotageurs, deadheads and incompetents in our midst are. And we would likely have a working (albeit, um, suboptimal) healthcare system in the U.S. There is nothing like compact text that human beings can parse with their eyes, regardless of whether they know anything about text processing. That's what the DTD formalism *still* provides today. If the purpose of a programmer's task is to make machines facilitate human communication, nobody should care how hard that task is, least of all the programmers. While laziness is definitely a virtue in programmers, the stovepipe priesthood is merely vicious when it sacrifices the purpose of the task on the altar of its own convenience. Len Bullard was very correct to point that out, although his euphemisms didn't put it as plainly as I put it to you now. Human communication (and there's no other kind of communication) is an extremely demanding mistress. She withholds her favors readily and often, but not at all capriciously. By the way, I still program every day for a living, and I spent almost two decades of my life developing international standards for data processing in tough, sweaty committee environments. Steve Newcomb Also, it's besides the point -- and maybe I misunderstood you -- but I doubt we would have a working healthcare system even if the ACA web app worked fine. The ACA is a band-aid, or maybe a first step, in my view -- it doesn't go nearly far enough. But that's waaay off-topic. sorry. -Mike
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