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At 12:32 PM 5/19/2003 -0400, Jim Ancona wrote:
>Jonathan Robie wrote:
>>This is, of course, the standard propaganda technique known as poisoning
>>the well. Here are two good descriptions of this technique:
> >
> > http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/poisoning-the-well.html
> > http://seercom.com/bluto/skepticism/criticalthinking/irf.poiswell.html
>
>I've re-read my message and Jim Waldo's blog entry a couple of times, and
>I can't seem to figure out what prompted this reaction. Perhaps you can
>explain in what sense my posting (or Waldo's post) is an example of
>poisoning the well?
Perhaps I was reading things you did not mean to imply. What bothered me
was the intersection between Waldo's blog entry:
>"I can't think of a single standard that was invented by committee that
>has survived in the marketplace. The long-standing standards are those
>that were first de facto standards, and were described (no invented) by
>the standards bodies."
And your comment:
>Some of the follow-on XML standards like XML Schema and XQuery are clearly
>in the "invented" category. It will be interesting keep Jim's comments in
>mind as we watch their progress.
I thought you were implying something along these lines: "invented
standards can't survive in the marketplace, XQuery is an invented standard,
it's like XML Schema which we all know is too complex, therefore..."
At any rate, that's what I was reacting to - I apologize if that was not
the intended meaning.
For what it's worth, I don't know whether to say XQuery is a language
invented by committee or not. If I read through the solutions to the Use
Cases in XQuery, they are remarkably similar to the solutions in Quilt [1],
the submission that formed the basis for XQuery. And Quilt was, in turn,
based solidly on existing languages including XML-QL, XQL, XPath, XSLT,
SQL, and OQL. The main difference between the two is the type system -
Quilt was largely untyped, XQuery permits a range of typing. The static
typing of XQuery was the work of a small group of individuals, the dynamic
typing is being hammered out by the larger committee.
Jonathan
[1] http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/chamberlin/quilt.html
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