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On 03/23/2017 02:34 PM, Steve Newcomb wrote: > On 03/22/2017 07:54 PM, Peter Flynn wrote: >> Given that hardly any automotive documentation is in XML (or even SGML) >> any more ("too hard"), it's probably moot for this group, unless we want >> to start a user-supported tractor-documentation project:- > > I would argue, smilingly, that Peter's "too hard" observation is > on-topic. This has happened in another well-known field too: LaTeX (see http://latex.silmaril.ie/formattinginformation/preface.html#myths2) Like LaTeX, XML is not "difficult", it's just "different", both from wordprocessors and from conventional programming languages. Writers wouldn't like it because of the many reasons I have gone into before; programmers hate it because it's not _per se_ a programming language. > If the XML community doesn't choose to respond to change, or even > acknowledge it, it is moribund. Adapt or die. It will eventually be superseded by something else. In the meantime it is receding into the wainscoting as it should: invisible to anyone except ourselves, but sitting there doing its job. > P.S.: SGML was "too hard", too. The transformation into XML involved > shedding features that, in retrospect, were solutions to problems that > had once been considered compelling. Unfortunately, once editors had been written to enable one-click (well, maybe two-click) markup insertion and other markup manipulation, the job was considered done. There is ample scope for editors which do a better job for actually authoring in XML, especially for non-XML-expert authors, but publishers are largely uninterested in this route, having been bitten too many times in the past. ///Peter
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