Re: participating communities (was XML Blueberry)

[Tom Bradford <bradford@dbxmlgroup.com>]

"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote:
> What indeed?  Perhaps the cost of rebuilding the parsers because
> of a bit of paranoia about where they will be used, feature-envy,
> whatever.  It is like flood-mitigation:  many residents don't like
> to pay for the mistakes of real estate developers twenty years after
> they take the profits because the original land surveys lied about the
> history of the property and the likelihood of flooding.

The needs of the many outweigh the "oh crap, I have to maintain my
software" complaints of the few.  I'd say a thousand or so programmers
updating (not rewriting) their parsers to support blueberry is a small
price to pay for the uncountable who will benefit from it in the future.

> >The last thing anyone should want to do is fragment XML, because it
> >defeats the overwhelming benefit of XML, that being the ability to
> >interchange data in a brain-dead easy fashion.
> 
> But it has failed.  Thus Blueberry.

Exactly... So we fix it, and help to further avoid future problems.

> >The last thing I want to
> >hear anyone say is that it's perfectly ok to have an incompatible custom
> >implementation of XML.   I think we've seen enough history of splintered
> >standards turning our lives into living hells.
> 
> You are living in Hell?  Do you have flooding there too?

Phoenix, AZ is Earthbound version of hell, and yeah, we have flooding
during the monsoon.

> The most I am daring is that this is a problem best solved
> in SGML where the solution is both legal and standard.   It seems that
> you are mistaking XML with a standard.  It isn't.  It is a product of
> the W3C Consortium that depends on a legitimate relationship with the
> original

The W3C isn't a standards body?  Could have fooled me: 
   http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=1174

-- Tom