xml-dev - Re: More Stupid XML Articles

[Bob Kline <bkline@rksystems.com>]

Hey, lighten up, guys. :->} You have to remember who's writing this
stuff.  Dvorak is the original troll, who loves nothing better than
riling everyone up with outrageously over-simplified one-liners.

Cheers,
Bob

On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Dmitri Pavlenkov wrote:

> "elegant simplicity of HTML"? 
> To me it looks when HTML is simple, it's not elegant,
> and when it's elegant, it's not simple anymore! What,
> and add to this different UA requirements, even among
> desktop browsers, that becomes a greater mess.
> 
> "a simple informational Web site for themselves or
> their families, or for a small business" 
> I'm sure families and small businesses would
> appreciate better viewing and more features, if they
> could only get them :) I'd say they'll be very excited
> when they visit even a simple SVG site. Which _is_
> easy, simple, and elegant.
> 
> "XML is, in many ways, a vague standard insofar as
> definitions of XML elements are concerned"
>  can we seriously consider that? The author is
> probably confusing definitions and interpretations.
> After all XML is a language for writing languages. The
> rules of writing XML are very strict, but there are no
> restrictions on what you may write.
> 
> Ok, here's the whole paragraph:
> "Just look at the recent recommendations by the W3C
> (World Wide Web Consortium), which dominates Web
> standards. The W3C has recently added XSLT and XPath
> to the mix of XML-related standards to watch. XPath is
> a FAT (file allocation table) applied to an XML
> document. Great, now we need this kind of thing to
> keep track of a page. XSLT means Extensible Stylesheet
> Language Transformations. This amounts to a conversion
> mechanism that is predefined so that various media can
> adapt the XML Web page and view it exactly as it was
> created on competing browsers. So instead of some
> universal way to handle XML on different devices, you
> can define your own custom ways to handle it."
> I apologize for quoting the whole thing, but it seems
> author here, while trying to point out disadvantages
> of XML tools, managed to show us their great advantage
> :)
> 
> "Nobody knows what to do about this." 
> author is generalizing, I know what to do about this,
> you probably know, too, he should have said: "I don't
> know what to do about this."
> 
> Another paragraph (I just love it):
> "John Simpson's seminar at Seybold was titled "XML
> Q&A: Choosing an XML Parser." His description read:
> "Validating or non-validating? Java-based, Perl, or C?
> This month we tackle the tricky issue of which parser
> to use for your XML applications." These are serious
> programming concerns. This seminar marks the death of
> simplicity."
> Do users write programs? Do they really care what
> parsers we use? All they need is the end result.
> 
> "As all this happens, the simple nature of the Web and
> the Web's user-friendly character will be killed even
> before we see the tenth anniversary of the first GUI
> browser, which was released around 1993. "
> I don't know when the first GUI broser was released,
> but here are some points: How did interface change
> since XML and co. came into scene? We still use
> keyboard and mouse, touch screens etc. Do we have type
> or click more? Now users can get custom presentation,
> custom interface, custom interpretation, how
> friendlier can you get?
> 
> This article is just another kind of bland slander
> against something that author doesn't understand. His
> position of HTML vs XML, has no relevance to the
> situation. In most cases XML in combination with XSLT
> is used to produce HTML. Where do you see the
> competition? It looks like cooperation to me.
> 
> 
> --- "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>
> wrote:
> > 
> > http://news.excite.com/news/zd/001004/10/killing-the
> > 
> > This one will be believed because of the source.  
> > He doesn't even know when GUI browsers really first 
> > appeared.
> >