[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
OK, People don't embrase alternatives and they don't like Dom?
Within those words lay the question that may reveal the answer.
difficult topic? Dom makes it sticker?
I say there is no standard way to approach xml. one must be a real student
to learn its guts and understand an aweful lot about the internet, server
technology and at least one good computer language. Then one must have
very successful projects to show the management to get the commitment to
use it.
The missing ingredient is not flexibility of functionality but depth of
design knowledge needed to make truly functional an application.
somehow the subset of SGML markup community is too intelligent
they do not see that books for dummies has a massively increasing
market and
that persons who would not think of purchasing a BFD in one topic area,
would enthuasiacally endose it in another.
Like learning to fly, its not flight time that counts, its comfort with
the whole entire system [weather, plane and ATC] and confidence within
pilot's self as to resident ability to anticipate the full scope of the
problem (both actual and conditional), and to accomplish the task that it
might entail. [conditional expectation vs risk taking]
The pilot who says no fly today weather is too bad, and immediately
jumps into the same plane when a senior person says lets go, is a pilot
who has not yet endorsed his or her ability to scope and handle the situation.
Its the scope and confidence analysis that fails to jump the "I will
use it" hoop, when other languages or ways are already better known. (I
think it is scoping that makes people pay for support, they can learn
anything, but the time and resources it takes is such an unknown variable
that they are willing to pay twice the program cost for the hand holding
and access to resources.)
The conflict resolution within programmer self between previous
experience which can be used to scope and confidently project
resolutions vs a complicated different way might be the problem.
That is why a certain operating system became dominate when in fact
thousands of better operating systems existed they called it in those
days, installed based.
I supported an Internet service provider's customers once long ago, 99% of
the customers could not install a self install disc into windows 3.1 and
enter the user name and password, to connect to the internet without help.
I believe most of them would never purchased a computer at all, if it were
not for the support lines at the internet service providers.
Its anticipation and contingency handling balanced against self
confidence and level of knowledge that is the show stopper.
my opinion.
me
On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, Andrew S. Townley wrote:
>
> I'd have to agree with Michael on this one. The places I've been have,
> for the most part, tried to treat XML like something you needed to carry
> around on the end of a long stick (wearing a RAD suit). Most of the
> time, they just used the vendor supplied tools, or would just use Xerces
> (and DOM), because that's what most google searches seemed to indicate
> (speculation on my part here).
>
> Not many developers seem to like XML much, and fewer still seem to
> understand how to use it without shooting yourself in the foot from a
> portability and extensibility point of view (automagically generating
> data binding classes is one example). As a result, I think not as many
> people can really leverage the flexibility offered by XML if you use it
> in a more dynamic manner.
>
> So, I'd say that the use of *any* particular API by default is more
> related to the problem in paragraph #1 above than anything else. The
> others are just symptoms of that one.
>
> ast
>
> On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 00:21, Michael Kay wrote:
> > "People complain about the DOM, but they don't embrace alternatives.
> > For all the work that people have done to provide alternatives such as
> > JDOM, dom4j, XOM, etc. in the Java world, the typical users and the
> > major Java players still use DOM, warts and all." I'm not at all
> > convinced this is true, but I don't have any information at my
> > fingertips to dispute it. Would anyone care to present facts on one
> > side or the other?
> >
> > It's impossible to get facts about the how many developers are using
> > different technologies: all one can do is share personal impressions.
> >
> > There's a logic flaw in the first sentence above: the people who
> > complain probably do embrace alternatives; it's the people who don't
> > complain who don't. And the vast majority of developers don't
> > complain. They just put up with all the lousy stuff that's thrown at
> > them. Many of them probably don't even recognize that it's lousy,
> > others just expect technology to be lousy, that's how they earn their
> > living, by making lousy technology work. After all, even on this list
> > we all know that XML itself is not exactly flawless, yet we put up
> > with it.
> > But if this is true, why have cleaner, programming
> > language-friendly alternatives failed to displace the dear old
> > DOM as the dominant XML programming model after all these
> > years? I have a few hypotheses (and these are MY hypotheses,
> > not some FUD from Evil Empire Central Command, so blame me for
> > any stupidities and the blatant exaggerations).
> >
> >
> >
> > - Duh, the network effect. A mediocre standard beats a better
> > non-standard every time.
> >
> > - Serious XML developers use XSLT for the heavy lifting and
> > simply don't worry about APIs any more.
> >
> > - Sun and IBM haven't included any of the alternatives in
> > their distributions, so the masses don't even know these
> > things exist, or fear being stranded in a backwater if they do
> > adopt one.
> >
> > - Compiled languages are *so* last century, all the
> > interesting XML processing alternatives are in the dynamic
> > languages world. [E4X | Python | Ruby | PHP | Scala ] rulez,
> > who cares about any of that stuff anymore?
> >
> >
> >
> > Thoughts on any of these hypotheses, anyone?
> >
> >
> >
> > I don't see much of your option 4. The others are all
> > perfectly valid. DOM is part of the JDK so it must be
> > mainstream. There's also a 5: A lot of Java users think that
> > data binding is the right way to do things. And a 6: in many
> > large companies technology choices are made by people with
> > very limited technical knowledge - certainly not by
> > programmers.
> >
> >
> >
> > Michael Kay
> >
> > http://www.saxonica.com/
>
|
