RE: intertwined specs

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 12:58 PM 2/16/01 -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>Hard problems; heavy solutions.  I only got mad
>when the XML spec was tossed to the floor asserting
>it would be easy after that.  Anyone with experience
>knew it would only get harder and more complex.
 >[...]
>But easy? That IS how XML was sold, I agree.  Caveat emptor.

The way I like to put it is that "simple things should be simple to do".  I 
think that's what is getting lost in the intertwined jungle of specs.

I don't want to get in the way of 
enterprise-data-integrators-connecting-thousands-of-legacy-systems-to-create-knowledge-from-raw-atoms.

On the other hand, I don't want their needs to obscure the simple and 
powerful stuff you can do without the heavy-duty complexity.  And that, I'm 
afraid is what's happening now.  Molehills all seem to look like mountains 
to the people with nuclear weapons, or something like that.

It's nothing new - I bounced off of HyTime pretty violently because it 
didn't clearly offer any simple way to do simple projects.  XML did offer 
such things, but now I think they've been buried under an incredible pile 
of brilliant clutter yet again.

Maybe some other organization will eventually take on XML much as the W3C 
took on SGML.  Always seems to produce an uproar, but there's some light in 
that heat.  And hey, maybe they'll have a less-restrictive confidentiality 
policy, and fewer dreams of machine intelligence.

Back to labeling that road map...


Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books