Re: [xml-dev] Is "Hand Authoring" XML still a critical use case ?

["Pete Cordell" <petexmldev@codalogic.com>]

Original Message From: "B Tommie Usdin"

> Are there people who hand author XML? Yes. And more often there are people 
> who fix XML by hand. Are all of these people XML Geeks? No! Many of them 
> are content experts, and some of them are clerical/support staff with no 
> programming skills at all.

To better understand how your people use XML, could you describe the skill 
sets of your users, and how that relates to how they use XML?  (For example 
I wouldn't expect an abstract modern artist to immediately take to hand 
crafting XML, whereas a mechanical engine might more readily.)

> I work in a world in which XML users find entities and mixed content 
> essential, make effective use of DTDs, and find clarity more important 
> than terseness.

Could you describe some use-cases of how they use DTDs and entities?  (I 
completely understand how mixed is useful.)

Hypothetically, if XML didn't use DTDs to parse a file, could you come up 
with some other solution that your users could work with?

> In this world document models and document processing infrastructure are 
> stable for years while content changes constantly, so it is important to 
> optimize for content creation and use, not for modeling and support 
> programming. (Making life easier for XSLT programmers is insignificant 
> compared to making it easier for document authors, for example.)

I don't think XML 1.0 is going away anytime soon.

Thanks,

Pete Cordell
Codalogic Ltd
Interface XML to C++ the easy way using C++ XML
data binding to convert XSD schemas to C++ classes.
Visit http://codalogic.com/lmx/ or http://www.xml2cpp.com
for more info