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On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 06:50:09AM -0500, Jonathan Robie wrote:
> There are people who represent this list as a kind of industry consensus,
> gauging the importance of new technologies by their reception on this list.
That sounds like a misrepresentation of what xml-dev is intended to be.
My conception of xml-dev has always been a gathering of developers of
XML-based technologies, be they specifications, APIs or processing
models. I don't know if it can be used to achieve consensus as much
as it can separate the mildly controversial from the extremely
controversial. :-)
> I like this list - and the people on this list - but I suspect we are not a
> representative cross-sample of industry. I also suspect that our many
> confident assertions about which technologies probably fall more into the
> category of coffee-break musings than prophecy.
Quite true. However, we are a self-selected sample that is skewed
to one side of the bell curve. We all interact with radically
different spliters of the XML world. So xml-dev serves a very
important role as a virtual water cooler of sorts to share ideas
and POVs.
It is quite important that xml-dev exist so that there is a free
exchange of ideas *about* XML. Just as it is dangerous to take a
POV that XML Schema is exactly what "the industry wants", it is
just as dangerous to take the POV that "no one wants XML Schema";
the true answer lies somewhere in the middle. (Many thanks to
Rick Jeliffe for pointing out that the publishing domain will likely
never adopt XML Schema, while database vendors and RPC users will
likely want *something*, even if it isn't XML Schema per se.)
Z.
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