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On Sun, 8 Dec 2002, W. E. Perry wrote:
> Ian Graham wrote:
>
> > Philosophically I agree with Tim - I am much more comfortable with technology I
> > understand, and technology that lets me see what's going on, and why it works (or
> > doesn't). But I also think this is a purists / technologists perspective, and one not
> > embraced by application portfolio managers / developers in non-technology businesses
> > (like financial services, manufacturing, etc.)
> >
> > And they're the ones buying all the stuff!
>
> In my experience--which does sometimes seems very different from that of others on
> xml-dev--this has to rank as the chief appeal of markup to the non-technologist. Everybody
> understands labelling things in plain text, and non-technologists seem naturally to assume
> that the machinery will deal with the plain text labels in some sensible way. Isn't this
> exactly what Dr. Goldfarb was originally looking for, when he decided that he didn't want
> the technologists obscuring his own document text from him and that he didn't trust
> anything they were doing that couldn't be done in plain sight with plain text?
That's a good point. In the case of the WS project I'm working on, one of
the benefits is (I hope!) the re-casting of messages using human-
understandable prose -- my goal is that we are able to review the actual
message structures with the business analysts, and even the business
owners, to confirm that the content and context of the messages make
sense to them.
But that's the goal. Those messages need to be wrapped into a SOAP
envelope and the WS framework, and the constraints of W/S tooling (and XML
schemas within that tooling) seem to be having a deleterious effect on
achieving this goal .... But to be fair, that's in part because the
tooling is new, and some obvious features (fault management is poor,
handling of schemas, ) are not well implemented.
Ian
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