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Tim Bray writes:
> I disagree. While I still dislike the AF attribute remapping syntax, I
> think there was a whole complex of great ideas lurking in there that
> failed to succeed because the language used to describe them was more or
> less completely impenetrable. I know I pretty well completely failed to
> understand it, and only kind of got it when walked through step by step
> with lots of examples, and subsequently remained completely unable to
> follow the discussions among the cognoscenti.
I did my best to promote AF's right around the time XML 1.0 came out,
but I agree with Tim that language was the biggest barrier to
adoption. RDF and Topic Maps suffer from much the same problem --
there is a tendency for people to take a simple concept like element
aliases (Architectural Forms) or entity/relationship serialization
(RDF, Topic Maps) and bury it in such obtuse and self-aggrandizing
language that no one can make head or tails of the specification.
I have to admit that as members of the old XML WG, Tim and I allowed
some of the same kind of thing to happen with the Namespace
specification: you wouldn't guess from a first (or third) read through
the REC that Namespaces are nothing more than XML package names, like
the package systems in Java, Python, or Perl.
XML 1.0 is a good counter-example -- an honest spec that uses plain
language without sacrificing technical quality.
All the best,
David
--
David Megginson, david@megginson.com, http://www.megginson.com/
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