Re: XSLT Hello World - outreach

On Thu, 2014-03-27 at 15:45 +0000, Ihe Onwuka wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 2:42 AM, Liam R E Quin <liam@xxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2014-03-27 at 01:39 +0000, Ihe Onwuka wrote:
> >> Step 1. Encourage people to use XRX or some approximation thereof for
> >> the prototype or PofC of their application.
> >
> > How would we do that?
> >
> 
> Guerilla tactics.
> 
> Talk directly to the people who have ownership of the problems they
> want solved .

There are an awful lot of people.

One thing I'm seeing now which disturbs me is people moving to HTML 5
for complex documents - e.g. book or journal publishers - where there is
a need for long-term archiving. It's much better than Word Perfect /
Ventura Publisher / Word Perfect / WordsStar files on floppies or Zip
discs, for sure (I think I might still have some Magic Wand files
somewhere), but it's a fraction of their potential - book publishers,
like film studios and distributors, generally think of their products as
atomic, single units: you publish a book and archive it on a shelf until
you do the next edition. But really they are treasure-mines, the
untapped lodestone, the unopened sock-drawer of the mind.

I hope (if I get further with the writing in time, and if it's
acceptable), more on this in August.

> You try and get in at the prototype and PofC stage before the IT bods
> have had a chance to over-engineer anything and to stay under the
> radar of the risk management programme. It helps if you can come in
> within the budgetary discretion of one or a few people.

Yes.

> Simon Peyton-Jones says that Excel is the worlds most widely used
> functional programming language. You cannot get an investment banking
> internship without some Excel sklils in your portfolio.
> 
> How do you think it got to be that way?

Lotus 1 2 3 was a "killer application" until IBM bought it and Microsoft
killed it by giving away one that was almost as good.

[...]

> > I loved the "NoXML" idea.

The term "NoSQL" has been a word used to make a brand, to market the
idea that you can have a database query language other than SQL, that
not all databases have to be relational.

Someone in this thread (I think - maybe you can identify yourself?)
mentioned using NoXML as a way to say that our XML tools operate on
trees and forests, not pointy brackets, and to "reinvent" and "rebrand"
XML a bit.

Maybe NoDOM would be good too.

> Dunno what that means. This is where being thick helps. It enforces a
> simplicity to your communication that will never confuse the
> recipient.

You have too high a level of literacy for me to think you "thick", but I
am happy to accept I didn't communicate clearly!

> Inertia - I don't think having all those spreadsheets was part of any
> banks strategic plan.

Having over a million lines of XSLT is not unheard of. Often a lot of
that is automatically generated to handle XML-based messages sent over
the Web (e.g. SOAP, Web services), but systems usually grow rather than
shrink.

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml