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Welcome to the position SGMLers were in before
the markup market driven by HTML took off. A
few of us did fine as consultants; others had
some products but shaky companies. Look at
the economic history of SoftQuad before the web.
Some others did well servicing the big deep pockets
of CALS and the auto industry, but in the mainstream,
markup was written off as dead and obsolete. The
serious technical and personal chasms in the community
itself didn't help matters, but it drew lines that
helped some help themselves to polity and glory.
Selah.
Some markets are accidents of history and have
little or nothing to do with the quality of the
technology or the uses to which one can put it.
Until something hits, attention is elsewhere.
RDF may get a hit like that or it may not. It
may get traction in some niches only to have
some subset upstart that does 20% for 80% of the
users and that goes like heck, the promoters of
teh subset get political clout, and then they
set out to show how all the previous RDF work
and designs were deeply flawed and that they can
do a better job with a simpler system. And they
win. Or RDF is a technology that moves along drafting
on the success of some mini-app like RDDL and
that gets just enough traction to kickstart growth
in the community.
No one knows for sure. Ever.
If others aren't making money with RDF and you
are, that's more for you. No charity required.
len
From: Uche Ogbuji [mailto:uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com]
What can I do with XML that I can't do with simple comma-delimited files? And
don't tell me "use XML tools to process it. I may not have any stinking XML
tools around because I can't think of anything useful to do with them!
As I said, *no* technology can be "justified" to a committed skeptic. So why
bother trying?
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