RE: more grist

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

I realize that.  I defend and praise Steve 
because I watched his struggle.  He is a 
very smart man and a very dedicated one. 
We all benefit from his investment... more 
than most know including probably, Steve. 
I have a fascinating video tape of him 
teaching my daughter to play piano.

Eliot knows his stuff.  He is right on.
To be fair, we all knew XML would be only 
as easy as the user was capable.  XML in 
the sense of well-formedness is easy, both 
for the programmer or author.  With every 
part of it you have to learn (see David 
Megginson's article), it gets a bit more 
complex.  Most of this isn't precisely 
XML.  It is learning about the XML 
application vocabularies that have emerged 
for handling XML documents, eg, XPath, XSLT, 
and so on.   In this respect, it is getting 
harder than SGML because by the time SGML 
was getting into this, HTML emerged and 
the curve flattened out as the community grew. 
So did the capability.  

The "lie" was that distributed hypertext 
could become world wide hypermedia and a portable 
operating system for heterogeneous 
platforms and stay simple.  It can't. 

XML is easy.  <:/>, ?, & and so on and 
off the DePH goes.  But applying anything past 
that is just as hard as applying equivalents 
elsewhere.  It coulda been LISP but...

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Vegt, Jan [mailto:Jan.Vegt@softwareag.com]

I absolutely agree. 
Just for clarity sake I wasn't trying to be disrespectful to Steve ; only
stating my own ignorance.

Looking at that 'power of groves' discussion Eliot Kimber's comments [ 'XML
is easy as a big lie' strike me as dead on even today.