xml-dev - Re: Pontifications on the Perversity of Pedantry, Punditry, and Purple

["Michael Champion" <Mike.Champion@softwareag-usa.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Prescod" <paul@prescod.net>
To: ",XML-DEV (E-mail)" <xml-dev@xml.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2000 2:47 AM
Subject: Re: Pontifications on the Perversity of Pedantry, Punditry, and
Purple Prose (was Re: Foreign Names)


>> require annotation by gurus, deconstruction by
>> pundits, and exegesis by experts in order to be useful.
>
> XML does not require any of that. And it seems quite popular.

This gets to the very heart of the matter: I believe that XML is quite
popular because there is a very simple, powerful idea at the heart of it ...
pretty much what Simon St. Laurent and others call "Common XML". People
quickly understand and apprectiate this "80:20" point in the spec simply by
seeing examples; they never delve into the specs until they have to move
into the other 80% of XML.

At that point things start getting ugly, and "exigesis by experts" becomes
necessary.  Those who can simply leave the details of XML to the experts and
use their parsers, APIs, etc. won't have much of a problem.  My rant comes
from working and talking with people who are out *implementing* parsers,
transformation engines, etc. without having had their brains pickled in SGML
for years. I assure you that the XML specs are not "quite popular" with
them.

I agree with Paul Prescod and Jonathan Robie: The way forward is to define
truly rigorous data models for XML, XSL, XPath, Query, etc. so that software
developers can KNOW what they're dealing with....


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