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No, but tools that enable people to sit down in rooms
and document the results of their negotiations in the
forms of machine-processable understandings is a boon.
Unless you are in a closed system of one authority, you
cannot escape the negotiation toward final fixed forms.
All Bosak is doing is precisely what SGMLers have always
done: organizing the selected names. The problem of
adding the programmers is that suddenly, XMLers want
to define what the names mean too. Implementing what
they mean is a different task, and very programmer
appropriate. Strangely, that was almost the Hytime
problem too. The names of the names used to name
the names became very obscure and that stifled the
conversation like a fart in a crowded room. MMTT.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@simonstl.com]
At 08:39 AM 8/4/2002 -0400, Didier PH Martin wrote:
>You know its easy to say, they are wrong when in fact we (and mostly the
>W3 organization) created the situation. Its probably time to take some
>responsibility of the consequences of the XML community actions and ways
>of thinking. I know its not popular to say that :-)
I'm not sure why creating XML "created the situation". Before XML,
developers had to think about how to exchange and store their information,
and after XML, developers still have to think about how to exchange and
store their information.
The only thing that's changed is a common syntax (now markup) for some of
that information. I don't see how that creates a responsibility for markup
to do the rest of a job that properly belong with developers close to the
specific tasks that need to be solved.
Perhaps in the enthusiasm about solving one problem (syntax) some folks
thought that they weren't going to have to work anymore, but I don't think
that's a problem for XML. Instead, by attempting to solve all these
developer problems, something you apparently want to continue doing, we've
added all kinds of new problems to XML (and the W3C's use of "XML" in spec
names adds to the perception that XML itself has the problems.)
It's time to stop solving developers' problems generically, and let them
solve the problems themselves building from only a basic syntactic
framework - if and only if the framework is appropriate to their
problem. XML is not a magic wonder-glue for programming.
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