RE: [xml-dev] DOM or SAX: Sense and Sensibility

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

Another reason seems to be the "buddy effect".  Some 
people are afraid to be the first penguin in the water 
because of the hungry walruses.  So they wait until 
a penguin gets hungry enough to go in after fish, 
and if it returns, others follow.  That story is a 
cultural metaphor for companies that have badgered 
their employees into "do only your job inside the 
box I give you" thinking.  These types wait until 
the pilot implementors or pioneers come back, then 
get their code or pick their brains and do only that.

<offtopic>I see a lot of that these days as the layoff disease 
spreads and the panic goes deeper.  Of course, that 
kind of thinking might be said to lead to conditions 
where a shrinking market share is inevitable, but 
that also might be wrong.  It depends on how one 
views the notion that well-focused employees are 
productive employees.  Both ends of the argument 
are right and not mutually exclusive depending 
on conditions.  Yet, failing to know how to pick 
the right API for the job, worse, failing to be aware 
there are options seems to be inefficient in the 
first case and not survival-oriented in the second.

It is very hard to fix a culture that is inward-facing 
out of fear because the typical response is to pretend 
to superiority as a means of masking the failure to 
understand the situation.</offtopic>

len

-----Original Message-----
From: david.hunter@mobileq.com [mailto:david.hunter@mobileq.com]


I think a lot of programmers, who aren't XML gurus, just got used to the
fact that "this is
the way you work with XML".  I've even heard people referring to an XML
document as "a DOM", which shows how deep the confusion can go.