RE: [xml-dev] XML for Video, Pizza Shops & TakeOut

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

Sounds fine.  But should they use the brother in law's domain 
name for all of the namespace declarations for pizza everywhere?

SGML was a sort of half way point bridging the programming 
priesthood and the documentation drones that serviced them. 
XML has relentlessly pushed into evermore esoteric areas 
of programming, network messaging and so forth.  Fun is 
related to interests.  The dough maker could probably 
care less about the XML.  The pizza shop owner might 
want to look into the brother in law and find out 
what else is on that web page.  And so on.  XML is 
not ASCII.  ASCII doesn't have a namespace, schemas 
(pick several), doesn't enable links, styling.  About 
all they have in common is repurposing.   So one can't 
safely reduce it all to "don't worry, we're handling 
that".  Business owners should be keenly aware of the 
XML they use.   There are many aspects to opening a 
system up to interoperation and some of them do affect 
the business outside the MIS group.

When many of us started on this trek, we heard first 
hand Dr Goldfarb's admonition, "SGML is there to protect 
information from people like us".  It was to free up 
information from being trapped in the implementation 
notions of the programmer.  Implementations of XML 
can do a lot of damage to that notion all the time 
wearing a sincere mask of enlightened disinterest. 

The system matters.  Choose well.

len



-----Original Message-----
From: David Lyon [mailto:david@globaltradedesk.com]

Len,

That sounds like ebXML. 

Our solution is to give the stores a CDR business card with our Ordering 
Software on and sell them at the counter for $5 each.

Pizza orders can be received over the net by the software and appear on the 
screen. They can be collected with the card as identification (not
mandatory) 
or delivered in the usual way.

It doesn't have to be pizza or videos, but they're just the ones that would 
be fun to do.

As for me, I'm not of the opinion that XML has to be boring. Why can't it be

a bit fun and cool.