xml-dev - Re: The failure to communicate XML - and its costs to e-business

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Richard Lanyon writes:

 > The question is, how much of the XML-associated technologies do you
 > /need/ in order to be able to start working on XML?

My advice to a new XML user would be to learn XML 1.0 itself, XML
Namespaces, and (if she's a coder) at least one of the XML-related
APIs.  A glance at a Unicode tutorial might be a good idea as well.

After that, she should ignore the other specs until she has a serious
problem that she cannot easily solve otherwise; if she never ends up
reading RDF, SMIL, DOM, SAX, XML Schemas, XLink, XPointer, XSLT, SOAP,
RSS, CSS, XHTML, XHTML modules, etc., then she didn't need them in the
first place.

On the other hand, if she reads these specs too early, she'll just end
up inventing problems for the solutions she's learned.  Part of my
consulting work is cleaning up after people like that.

The only so-called XML-related W3C specs my customers have used so far
in real production systems (as far as I remember) are XML itself,
Namespaces, RDF (really!), XSLT, and XPointer (only through XSLT,
though).  I've heard of others using the DOM, though DOM
implementations seem to run into trouble in high-demand environments.
In all cases, the customers used each W3C spec because (a) it solved a
real problem that they would otherwise have had to invent a new
solution for, and (b) there was available software support.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/