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On Sun, 2002-10-27 at 05:47, Thomas B. Passin wrote:
> Sometimes it seems to me that most of the XML-related Recs/Specs that
> xml-dev'ers approve of are those that James Clark had a major influence on.
> Sax is an exception, I suppose, but that had David M. playing a unifying
> role, so maybe it is in a similar category.
>
> I would like to ask a few questions about this.
>
> 1) Is this perception widely shared on the list?
> 2) If so, is it specifically James, or is it the mode of development?
> 3) Are there any examples of good/elegant/approved (by xml-dev'ers) recs
> that were developed in a different way?
> 4) If there is a mode of development that tends to lead to especially
> good/elegant/etc recs, can we foster that mode? Or does it take specific
> individuals with very special knowledge and personal qualities?
One of the principles I value the most in James' way of approachning
problems is the fact that he doesn't seem to accept complexity and
reformulate and split complex problems over and over until he gets a set
of simpler and smaller problems to solve which are reasonably
independent.
(This is also visible in his Java classes where this is taken to a point
almost impossible to follow since he goes often up to defining a huge
number of classes having a dozen lines of code, but that's another
story).
I think that this focus on simplicity and modularity is what makes Relax
NG different from W3C XML Schema for instance.
Now, there comes a different issue which is that people within current
W3C WG seem to say that you can't remove a feature from a WG once it has
been introduced which might explain why recent W3C specs cannot apply
this rule (and why James had to carry on his work at other places).
Eric
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tom P
--
Rendez-vous a Paris (Forum XML).
http://www.technoforum.fr/integ2002/index.html
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Eric van der Vlist http://xmlfr.org http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
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