xml-dev - Re: Improved writing -- who's going to pay for it?

[Ronald Bourret <rpbourret@rpbourret.com>]

tpassin@home.com wrote:
> 
> Yes, I know, but better writing/editing makes the result stronger and
> (potentially, at least) more useful to those same companies.

I'd remove the "potentially". The result is always more useful.

The schema spec is a good example. Once I finally waded through it, I
found I liked most of what it offerred. Contrast that with the fact that
even now, whenever I pick it up, I get really p----d off at the fact I
can't understand anything it says. I can't help but wonder how much of
the controversy over schemas was due simply to frustration.

Never underestimate human factors in getting specs accepted in the
marketplace ...

> Terseness can be fine, and writing for the experienced practitioner is too.
> But have you noticed, when you try to refine and improve the communication
> of the concepts, it helps you understand or even discover what they really
> are?  Or it may help you find assumptions you didn't realize were there.

Writing is actually my first and strongest line of defense for debugging
code. If I can't write a simple comment explaining the code, then it's
time to start redesigning and recoding. Almost all of the bugs that
survive are typos (e.g. = instead of ==) and the few design bugs that
survive are ones where I never really was able to write a simple
comment.

-- 
Ronald Bourret
Programming, Writing, and Training
XML, Databases, and Schemas
http://www.rpbourret.com