RE: ZDNet Schema article,and hiding complexity within user-friendlyproducts

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

Not necessarily.   The problem in all of this 
is that using well-formedness as the basis 
for all XML applications forced language designs 
into the language itself.  Now we demand of the 
language design the same features we demand of 
the document.  Yet when we read paragraphs of 
the design document as I cited yesterday, they 
are targeted to highly specialized, highly trained 
readers with very narrow backgrounds.  Do you 
consider those really "human readable"?  

Most of you probably can't or don't decipher 
the contracts your companies use to get projects 
for you to work on.   It takes a lot of practice 
to see how even simple on the surface language 
leads to complex requirements or open ended non 
terminating tasks that bleed every bit of profit 
out of your companies.  That is why so many of 
your companies are failing out there.

The generic appeal to "humanity" while on the 
other hand focusing on a very narrow application 
of language is silly.   We need designs for 
language that work in the application environment. 
Socialism in engineering is not the way to take 
out costs.  It builds them back in, it makes them 
a permanent expanding feature of the design.  

In short, it fails to do anything truly useful.

I can read XML Schemas.  I am specialized but moreover, 
I have to study.   I don't see a lot of you demanding 
that Java be "human readable".  It is but only by 
well-trained humans.

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

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


-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Bohlman [mailto:ebohlman@earthlink.net]

4/24/01 1:25:49 PM, "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" 
<clbullar@ingr.com> wrote:

>Absolutely.  The value for contract-constrained 
>communication is the first and best application.

Which strongly implies that human readability and human 
writability are among the most important aspects of a schema 
language, and that the last thing we want is an "assembly 
language" that we expect our tools to hide from us.