RE: [xml-dev] SGML complexity

["Nathan Young -X \(natyoung - Artizen at Cisco\)" <natyoung@cisco.com>]

Hi.

> Sure that figures _only_ assure us that there exist more 
> books on PHP or
> JS than XSLT on Amazon database.
> 
> But it is an usual practice in many fields sizing the 
> activity/popularity
> in a field from the quantity of stuff is being written about. 

It's usual practice in all kinds of fields, especially politics, but
more generally anywhere that uninformed public opinion is assumed to
matter, to choose and present slices of data primarily on the basis of
how well they fit your agenda.

The three things I've seen argued on this list where a variety of
stastical garbage has been mustered in support of subjective viewpoints
are:
 - XSLT is more/less powerful than (technology X)
 - XSLT is more/less easy to learn than (technology X)
and now:
 - XSLT is more/less popular than (technology X)

What would we gain by proving a particular answer to any of the above
questions, even assuming such proof was possible?

---->N

> E.g. more
> papers and books devoted to string theory means that string theory -as
> attempt to quantize gravity- may be more popular than LQG or
> triangulations. Of course, this offers us just an 
> orientation; it is not
> law.
> 
> > Furthermore, "popularity" involves a notion of "preference" 
> and should
> > be clearly defined before we try to throw figures (the 
> figures you give
> > seem to be more relevant to "visibility" than "popularity").
> 
> <blockquote>
> The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the
> popularity of programming languages. The index is updated 
> once a month.
> The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of 
> skilled engineers,
> courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines 
> Google, MSN,
> and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that 
> the TPC index
> is not about the best programming language or the language in 
> which most
> lines of code have been written.
> </blockquote>
> 
> [http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm]
> 
> > Eric
> >
> > --
> > GPG-PGP: 2A528005
> > Lisez-moi sur XMLfr.
> >                        
> http://xmlfr.org/index/person/eric+van+der+vlist/
> > 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------
> > Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            
> http://dyomedea.com
> > (ISO) RELAX NG   ISBN:0-596-00421-4 http://oreilly.com/catalog/relax
> > (W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 
> http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
> > 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------
> 
> 
> Juan R.
> 
> Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)
>