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At 11:03 AM +0000 11/25/02, Michael Kay wrote:
>It's all a question of what stage you're at in the process. If you've
>decided to build a railway, and you assemble a team of railway engineers
>to design it, who then ask for feedback on the decision to use a
>particular loading gauge, then comments that say you should have built a
>canal instead are not going to get much attention. Those comments should
>have come earlier, while the decision was being made.
Of course sometimes it isn't obvious that the railroad won't work
until you've started building it. I've never built a railroad, but I
did once encounter a requirement for building a lake. When it was
discovered that the soil on the property wouldn't hold water, the
requirement had to be changed.
Of course in some cases it's not the requirements. I don't have any
major objection to the schema requirements. I just think the language
that was developed to meet those requirements is a disaster. Same
story for RDF. It's not the requirements I see as a problem. It's the
implementation of those requirements.
For XQuery/XSLT 2/XPath 2, yes. I think there's a lot of objection at
the requirements level. Many of us want to strip out typing
completely, or at least approach it as a two-phased solution: i.e.
first do everything that an be done without typing and the PSVI, then
do the next version that does know about typing and the PSVI. That
might ultimately meet the requirements, just not all in one step. In
keeping with the engineering similes, this is like building a space
station first, then going to the moon from there, instead of jumping
straight to the moon in one massive effort, then not going back for
50 years. Small steps that build on each other are good things.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ |
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| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ |
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