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A GUI is not just "elegant", but quite essential when capturing business
logic from subject matter experts, in my experience. I routinely use
Near & Far to build and edit DTD's in front of a group of SME's and
developers. The SME's (patent examiners, highly educated and
intelligent) have learned to express their processes within the logical
realm of DTD's (without having to learn the syntax, which is even more
important for Schema). When they ask me to do something that is not
legal XML, we analyze the business requirement in order to find a way to
express it in XML, or conclude that we need a Schema, or that it has to
be done in the application software instead. This would be difficult if
not impossible using a text editor. Still, we sometimes use an editor
for the fine tuning (control) that is needed in some cases, but very
rarely. That's left to the developers working on their own. Each tool
to its purpose.
Bruce B. Cox
SA4XMLT
USPTO/OCIO/AETS
703-306-2606
-----Original Message-----
From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) [mailto:clbullar@ingr.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 3:50 PM
To: 'ari@cogsci.ed.ac.uk'; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] relax ng public list?
I followed the link but didn't find the conspiracy theorist quote.
Dare makes a case. They have a big framework with lots of applications
using XML Schema and haven't digested all of it. A topic for a separate
reply.
Some people don't choose their tools. Some like the tools they have.
I am habituated to opening the text editor to work with markup in any
form until it proves too tedious to do so. W3C Schema isn't that
tedious, but a good editor helps. By contrast, to do much that is large
and efficient in X3D, an editor is a must-have for me but I know a few
folks who managed VRML97 without one. So you are right about the
complexity, but add to that, the opacity of the content regardless of
the encoding. Real time 3D files are full of number triples, so human
readable and human comprehensible aren't quite the same thing.
len
From: ari@cogsci.ed.ac.uk [mailto:ari@cogsci.ed.ac.uk]
"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com> writes:
> RNC certainly. A GUI user doesn't need a simplified syntax.
A GUI vs. text, as with any different-level-of-abstraction level
symbolic systems, is a tradeoff between ease and control. RELAX NG
doesn't have enough complexity to make giving up control worth the
marginal added ease for many people (no more than a speculation, again).
I'm sure someone somewhere wrote a GUI to edit /etc/fstab, but I don't
see a wide acceptance.
> why shouldn't VS enable one
> to select the schema language? Is it an issue of 'the W3C sanctioned
> this one and we are good members', or 'this came first and we had
> sweat equity in it, and you only need one', or 'sounds good, maybe
> later'?
Last time I speculated on that [1], you called me a conspiracy theorist
:=)
> A shot in the dark: RELAX NG is not perceived as an interesting
> technology in the domain where many desktop and services vendors are
> focused at the moment: web services.
>
> Would that perception be wrong?
Again, I think people who do "WS the VS way" are not the kind of people
who appreciate an elegant tool for a more civilized age.
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