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From: Jay Vaughan [mailto:jv@access-music.de]
>>1. Anyone with "20 years on the 'net" knows that anti-threads
>>spawn anti-anti threads and so forth. They will quickly create
>>more traffic on an unmoderated list than the original.
>No, not really. I've found that riling a few of the worst offenders
>usually cuts down on the noise a great deal. There is nothing
>special about xml-dev that detracts from this. Nobody likes a
>bitchslap, least of all 'oldtimers'.
It's been tried here. Never works. Just makes the monkeys mad.
See behavioral training and the problems of negative reinforcement.
Some have high pain threshholds and longer arms. NASA used that
to train Able and Baker. Baker lived out her life in a cage in
a museum and was famous for biting the dog out of her handlers
until the day she died. Bananas over electric shock except in
cases of *dire* necessity.
>All you have to do is ask yourself "is this political diatribe
>*really* worth sending to a few thousand strangers who are only
>really interested in me and accessible to me as a group because of my
>interest in XML?"
The problem is, what you label it as may not be what others label
it as. Exposure to liquidated damages by not understanding
indeminification clauses or obtaining the insurance is not a
political diatribe. It is a business risk. Spend more time
with your company's legal department and the reality of that
will come to you. I think that thread has concluded though
because we weaned the nugget out: insurance costs vs development
costs. The vendor has to choose because the buyer makes the
requirement. RFPs don't enable use of EULAs, so the risk
has to be managed.
>>See what Joe says about the philosophical issues of SGML
>>and now XML. It isn't just a 'freakin' technology because
>>it sets as one of its principal requirements, freedom from
>>the lifecycle of the host. That is a political requirement
>>and now a technical necessity.
>Rubbish, this 'principle requirement' is a technical one and always
>has been, since the day that data became separable from code.
No, closed systems worked fine. Separation of code from
data is how programs worked when I first started coding.
Then came objects to weld them back together. Along came
SGML in the document world in the 1980s to say that doesn't
work for long lifecycle documentation and if you did the CALS
initiative, you know it was a cost of lifecycle issue, not a technical
issue.
It required a technical solution, but the longer we worked,
the more we realized what the 'generalized' in SGML
meant: not just for manuals. We spent most of the second
decade(say 1985-95) of markup technologies (which predate SGML)
making the case for that.
>XML does not produce freedom from anything!
Not in and of itself, no. The object model has to be
considered too but that is in terms of interoperability.
One can do a lot with comma-delimited ASCII but it is
riskier and the benefits don't scale. XML does free
one from writing yetAnotherMarkupParser but people
insist on doing it anyway. Is that a technical or
a political issue?
>XML happens to be a good data-organization technique; it lends itself
>to rapid philosophical advances, technology-wise, in any realm in
>which it is applied, and new ways of thinking about old problems.
It is an old way of thinking about a never-gets-completely-solved
problem. As a data organization technique, it is so-so. I prefer
a relational server to an XML database, but that is because we
have very large databases. When we move bits on the wire,
I prefer XML to comma-delimited or
yetAnotherFormatRequiringYetAnotherParser.
>But it seems that making XML into a 'political' subject is the only
>thing left for some people to do with it, since as a technology - and
>any technology is only as good as you use it - XML solves so many of
>the problems which many 'consultants', 'engineers', and
>'professionals' were counting on to pay their bills.
If you own the solution, you defend the problem. Sad but so.
But applying markup is much more exciting these days. I remember
a short time ago when coding graphics values in markup was
heresy and even forbidden by policy. Once markup got out of
the bigCos and out into the wild, some wouldn't stand for that
and now we have SVG and X3D. That didn't come about because
of technology or politics alone; it came about because of both.
You would have had to watch Goldfarb at work in ISO to understand
just how much that is so. He is brilliant, tenacious, sagacious
and has a great stereo. Anyone who thinks XML would be here
without his and the ISO committee's work just doesn't know
squat about the history of markup. Believe me, the political
side was a lot tougher than the technical. Because they
worked with the web community, that fight was won. And now
some have the freedom to devote more time to the technical.
>That XML, and the XML culture in general, is being bashed into a
>territory rife with philosophical/political issues as demonstrated
>here on xml-dev belies the stagnation of the dataprocessing industry
>more than anything else.
Umm... do you have to create schemas for other people's businesses
often? The politics are ever present. The experienced designer
copes with that. In some organizations and implementations, the
only thing the schema is used for is to control human processes
because they never ever validateOnParse. It's a document for
human consumption. In others, they make a lot of use of it
in the processing pipeline. XML accomodates but doesn't care.
That was a technical modification that worked well by enabling
political options.
>Do we really need another re-interpretation
>of Schemas? How many engineers does it take to come up with a
>namespace system which works for the good of all?
Good questions. How many engineers have to amass political
clout for their answers to be heard and accepted?
>XML is a very broad, very workable technological solution to a lot of
>political/beauracratic problems in this industry,
I agree.
>which I guess is
>why the politics/beauracracy surrounding XML itself is thicker than
>the biomass at the base of many a monkey-laden tree...
Yes. It comes with the forest just like the howling.
> if there were
>more wide-spread *USE* of XML, there'd be a lot less talk about its
>politics.
I don't think so. I think more people would get better at the
politics of applying XML. That would be a good thing IMHO.
>XML is good for this industry, but this industry has not been good for XML.
C'est le banging.
>>One more thing: nerves will fracture in the haiku/anti-ku
>>season which starts next month. Get your syllable counters ready!
>Wicked. I can't wait.
I delete 'em. Most of these folks can't count syllables without
a parser. :-)
len
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