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On Tue, 21 May 2002, Joshua Allen wrote:
> On the other hand, the availability of tools and products for XML has
> lagged pretty badly, making it hard for the progress-minded CEO to find
> things to spend money on.
No, Joshua. That answer is precisely the "problem" not the solution.
Tools aren't what we lack. Applications are what we lack. You and
possibly a lot of this list are in the tools business. As once
said here, "We build the tools to build the tools and sell the
tools we build." That is the software building market and it is
actually not the market of interest to those the USA article has
in mind. XML in and of itself is not a very interesting or compelling
technology. Only the things we DO with it are.
I see a world of consultants and trainers out there who teach well-formedness,
a bit of SGML bashing, some brain dead XSLT transforming, and in advanced
classes, a few snippets of schemas. They don't explain why one would ever
want to use XML given the abundance of other solutions. It makes no sense
to the CEO out of the box except to say "well, everyone is doing it" and
that is precisely the hyped stupidity that got SGML in trouble, object-oriented
programming in trouble, AI in trouble and a lot of otherwise valuable but
almost failed emerging tech.
> The complication in the specs only makes it
> more difficult for vendors to produce products that people can overbuy.
That's true but that is also our fault (we being all of us who keep
rerationalizing the specifications). It is very hard for this
group to see it, but the market doesn't give a rats behind about
this problem. They want solutions for their specific businesses.
They do not want abstractions; they want physical touch and feel
I understand it because I recognize it solutions.
len
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