xml-dev - Re: The Power of Groves

["W. Eliot Kimber" <eliot@isogen.com>]

rev-bob@gotc.com wrote:

> I'm not even sure the name is so weird.  Granted, I haven't been following
> this topic (ahem) religiously, but so far, my initial reaction to the name doesn't
> seem too far afield.  What's a grove, I wondered?  Well, in the natural world,
> it's a collection of trees - and we all know what trees are.  Say, "tree" has a
> specific meaning in the programming field, not to mention the realm of markup
> - you don't suppose the name "grove" was chosen to represent a collection of
> tree-structured thingies, do you?  But then I said, naah, that'd be way too simple
> a concept for all these movers and shakers to have such a rough time with it.
> 
> Wouldn't it?
> 
> Please, tell me there's more hideousness to the concept than that.  ;)

Actually, that's exactly it. The DSSSL and HyTime working groups were
meeting at Trinity University in Dublin, Ireland, to try to resolve
their nasty shared abstraction problem. We had a couple of names that
were being batted around, but none were really acceptable (I will
refrain from mentioning them to protect the guilty). Jon Bosak popped up
to the library, perused the OED, and determined that "grove", defined as
"a collection of trees and other stuff" (more or less) was the best
name.  We all agreed. The expansion of "grove" as an acronym is, of
course, completely after the fact.

It's that simple.

Cheers,

E.