xml-dev - Re: Joel on XML

[Rick JELLIFFE <ricko@geotempo.com>]

> Dave Winer wrote:
> 
> Please read this essay, written by Joel Spolsky:
> 
> http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$133
> 
> "If you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen.
> Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create
> these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe
> that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all."
> 
> This is what I was trying to say to anyone who would listen at WWW9.
> (And on the Syndication mail list, and everywhere XML comes up.)

The rest of Spolsky's article is about vaporware and FUD, not
over-abstraction. That paragraph is an odd blip.

Is he really saying that the idea of messages is an over-abstraction?
This is pretty strange: packets are not an over-abstraction, JavaBeans
are not an over-abstrction, why should XML messages be an
over-abstraction necessarily?

Criticizing a general, non-technical marketing blurb for being vague is
futile. The pupose of those white-papers is so that barely-technical
decision-makers outside MS feel confident that MS has a good plan and
they are leading not reacting.  It is like Lousiana Governor Huey Long's
last compaign slogan "Vote for me, I'm not crazy".  I have not read a
"white-paper" from a large corporatoin that was not similarly
insubstantial: they are not written for us.

Rick Jelliffe