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> But I do agree. I, as participant of the KDE project, think I see a general
> resistance and misunderstanding towards XML. When an XML document needs a
> small, automated correction it's not written as an XSLT identity transform,
> but as a text-parsing Perl script, obviously horrible.
Ouch. I've actually started doing something with XUL - bundling small
(helper) XSLT classes in with the XUL code then putting a functional
invocation on the transforms, in essence calling them as functions. In
addition to simplifying a lot of the XML transactions that I work
with, I find that it helps the XSLT newbies on my team get a better
handle that XSLT really is just another computer language, one that
can in fact be used in precisely the same manner as any other
language.
There IS an art to working with XML, just as there is with any other
language, a perceptual understanding of XML trees in a set mode, just
as the way you approach programming using SQL differs from the way you
approach C++. Linux programmers in general usually tend to come up the
ranks as either shell coders (pure proceduralists) or C/C++ devs, and
getting them to shift their thinking to XML can be as hard as it is on
the Windows side (I note that most highly proficient XML developers
still come from the web/eCommerce side, where declarative programming
structures are far more common).
> An interest for
> marking public XML interfaces in schema languages are more or less met with
> the reaction of what it would be good for.
Programmers are like most people in that they have an investment in
what they've already learned, and are much less likely to adopt
something new unless they can see many benefits to their work. In many
respects XML is a fairly serious investment, as you are changing the
very workflow patterns that people have developed. People may want
improvements, but anything that disrupts their workflow will tend to
make them much more anxious about learning anything new.
> The KDE developers are plain developers; I think the case indicates that the
> well-known topic of spreading the word of XML is of significance.
Agreed.
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