RE: is that a fork in the road?

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

At 04:01 PM 3/2/01 -0600, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>What have we learned from XML's success?
>That the job wasn't done well enough to
>support the follow-on requirements.

Really?  Whose follow-on requirements?  And why does that require 
fundamental change to the original "job" that may seriously injure those of 
us whose requirements were met quite well already?

Why drive the "follow-on" stuff so deeply into specs those of us with 
simpler needs may have to use?

>Success?  Everyone can use <...  ...="..." />.
>Whoopee!  Try to connect the dots and see
>what happens.  That minimal victory bites.

That minimal victory has taken markup into realms I think most folks 
thought it would never see, and makes some difficult problems a lot easier 
to solve.  Let people connect the dots for themselves, instead of trying to 
build one-solution-fits-all creations.

That minimal victory "bites" a digestible chunk, rather than the huge and 
dense mass currently offered for universal consumption.



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