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- From: len bullard <cbullard@hiwaay.net>
- To: David Megginson <david@megginson.com>
- Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 12:18:13 -0600
David Megginson wrote:
>
> <aside>
> By the way, on a separate note, I find it disturbing that people like
> Paul Prescod, Eliot Kimber, and I have morphed from the young Turks in
> the SGML world a few months ago to the old grannies in the XML world
> now. It feels like the Star Trek episode where everyone aged rapidly.
> I was in Kindergarten when the Beatles broke up, dammit.
> </aside>
ROTFL. I was in high school when they broke up, but who cared. They
were passe by then and not yet *legendary*.
It is a perrenial in politics, David, and the only thing
Internet Time truly makes faster: as the twig is bent, so grows
the tree. This one, I hope (those of us who are grannies and
still beating this porch with our canes), will remember. Neophytes,
regardless of the committee they serve on, or the contract they
work on, have to learn the hard way. The net doesn't make everyone
or every company equal. Precisely the opposite, actually, but the
fellow crying out for smarter customers may get his wish and that
may really turn the W3C on its head. May we find having as good
as wanting. Remember the view of Beijing during the cultural
revolution: all of those fires where every peasant made steel
in back yard kilns where their gardens used to be
... while their children starved.
Simply the fact that so many developers can find so many ways
to use and implement SGML/XML systems is the testament to its
success. That is not hype. OTOH, hyping particular implementations
and *application standards* is the same business as it was for
SGML when the military and aerospaces standards groups were duking
it out a few years ago (eg, 28001 vs 87269): the flying phalanx.
Twelve years ago, we were spitting SGML out of relational dbs to the
Mentor Context system which took the SGML, parameterized it,
and spit out bitmaps for a viewer embedded in a MicroVAX.
Two years after that, we were sucking
the SGML raw into C structs and sending those to the screen
as navigable hypertext in a PC. By the mid-90s, TechnoTeacher and
others were showing us how to use SGML in OODBMS designs.
And so it goes. Last week, I was using memo fields to store
fragments of HTML in metadata-configured relational tables to
spit out HTML files for a viewer embedded in an Access form while other
parts parameterize a treeview.
We go round the loop back to the beginning because
even if it is old, it became new when the objects in the
framework became components. The next advantage to using
markup is that the small desktop dbs can pass information
to the terabyte dbs without dropping a bit. Sometimes
scaling isn't a matter of building a single application
that scales well, but fitting the right applications in
to the right scales. That is why I side with *file format*
argument, but can see why someone would want OOPs. It
really depends on what part of the system uses markup
how you apply it. (dummy slap to forehead, homer.)
<aside>It is more interesting to me to note that the DTD was
doing then what I do now with the logic/script and queries. We used
to say a DTD was a *frozen* query and it isn't that far off the
mark.</aside>
Again, the beauty of markup is that it works for all of these,
and all of these approaches can be mixed and matched. XML is
For What You Need It For. It can't "eat the web"; it can make
some applications work better for the purposes for which they
are designed. Design well; they work well. Misapply, and
a new contractor gets the next contract.
No size fits all. Some sizes fit most. Some fit tight.
len
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