Re: [xml-dev] Percentage of XML documents exclusively processed bymachin

[Michael Sokolov <sokolov@ifactory.com>]

On 12/3/2011 8:12 AM, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I'll take a wild guess and say that 99% of all XML documents are exclusively processed by machines. Is that a reasonable estimate?
That's not at all my experience.  Almost all the XML we handle 
(documents) has been authored by humans, and eventually is viewed by 
humans.  In the interim, it's processed by humans.  All of this is done 
with the aid of machines, of course, but very little if any of it goes 
completely unobserved by humans.

Eventually, once our development process is complete, we get out of the 
middle steps, but humans are still involved in the production and 
consumption of the documents.

The exception to this is some transactional processing on the business 
side of our operations, but that represents a tiny fraction of the XML 
in our world (academic reference publishing).  (Even in that area, 
humans enter the data that gets transformed into XML, and eventually 
view it too.) Maybe that says something about the economics of our 
business :)

-Mike