[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Please stop writing specifications that cannot beparsed/pr
Hi B Tommie, On Fri, 26 May 2023 08:00:43 -0400 B Tommie Usdin <btusdin@mulberrytech.com> wrote: > > On May 26, 2023, at 5:51 AM, Marcus Reichardt <u123724@gmail.com> wrote: > > ... > > > I have a hard time imagining "standard writers“ (if there’s such a species) > > who haven’t heard of XML at this point. > > There is such a species. Actually, there are really 2 such species; with > significantly different characteristics, and neither of which is guaranteed > to have heard of XML. > > - The vast majority of the world's standards are written as a volunteer > effort by subject matter experts: engineers, mechanics, materials physicists, > mechanics, biochemists, physicians, and other people with highly technical > expertise in areas totally unrelated to the encoding of computer readable > documents. > > These people are often barely literate in the use of word processors and > if they have heard of XML are more likely to think of machine-to-machine > information exchange than prose documents. > I have a hypothesis that such wilfully-ignorant, non-geeky, non-hackery, people are becoming less influential, less attractive, and rarer: https://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/philosophy/putting-cards-on-the-table-2019-2020/indiv-nodes/selling-for-stupider-ppl.xhtml > - The other group of "standard writers" are employees of standards > development organizations. There are many such organizations world wide. Many > of these people have heard of XML, have heard their counterparts talk about > XML at conferences, think they probably should be paying attention to > ANSI/NISO STS but are not, and have never actually seen an XML editor or and > XML document except excerpted on a slide at a conference. > > These people are following the several efforts in the standards community > to develop "smart standards". "Smart standards" is what the standards > community is calling standards that are deeply machine processable ... > and with a few very special exceptions they don't exist yet. > > These people, rightly in my opinion, are waiting to see their community > agree on an approach to making the requirements in standards machine > processable before committing time, money, and reputations to changing > their word-processor based processes. > > BUT ... many of the people working in the publishing areas of standards > development organizations are heads-down publishing people who support > the volunteer efforts, guide groups of volunteers through complex > legal/regulatory processes, clean up word processing documents, proofread > PDF, and make publications happen using decades old processes. If these > people have heard of XML they dismissed it as new, trendy, probably > expensive, and unimportant. > -- Shlomi Fish https://www.shlomifish.org/ https://github.com/shlomif/validate-your-html - Validate Your HTML Summer Glau can lead a horse to water, and then it will drink out of its own volition. — https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/facts/Summer-Glau/ Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - https://shlom.in/reply .
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