[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Mike Champion wrote:
> 1/14/2002 5:58:38 PM, "Jonathan Borden"
> <jborden@mediaone.net> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> >A terrific amount of work can be
> >done with just a little XML,SAX,DOM and XPath/XSLT. Ok, but
> you really want to cure cancer, well that's hard.
>
> And if your job is to find a cure for cancer, the last thing
> you want to be doing is devising grammars, writing parsers,
> defining APIs, etc.
>
Well Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. Hard problems require us to roll up
our sleeves and create innovative solutions. Perhaps if we could simply
download Microsoft's latest "CuringCancer.SDK.NET", then cancer would
already be cured, but we can't and it isn't. That's what makes the problem
hard.
Of course we could all sit around waiting for the perfect high level XML API
that just happens to encode the domain expertise of every problem in the
world, but we would be waiting, literally, forever.
XML actually does get us part of the way there, because _really_ the last
thing one wants to be doing is debugging binary RPCs, or writing parsers for
that matter. Designing grammars, at some level becomes designing an ontology
and if we are talking about domain expertise, you need an expert to do the
work.
XML doesn't solve the hard problems itself, but what it does (hierarchical
syntax), it makes easy.
Jonathan
|
