Re: [xml-dev] Do you enjoy neighborhoods where every house looks the sam

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@wendellpiez.com>]

Hi,

I almost never post to this list, mainly because the wattage shorts
out my brain. I find that even reading it gets me freaky, to say
nothing of writing for it.

Nevertheless I have to write this time, mainly because I've been
thinking about these issues for so long.

Bill's counterexample is not only interesting because it undermines
the evident logic of Mike's door example, but also because it doesn't
actually demonstrate anything conclusive; it only complicates it. A
real counterexample would have a carpenter hand-making a door to fit
without the benefit of any specialized tools for measuring, making,
and hanging doors: it would be done entirely by hand using tape, saw,
drill (hand drill only please), plane, sandpaper, varnish and
I-don't-know-what-else you use to make and hang a door. This John
Henry of a carpenter would do as well as the factory, as cheaply, and
(unlike John Henry in the song) would live to do it again and again at
competitive rates.

But the local lumber yard has its own door-and-trim shop! They are
able to do custom work at a fraction of the expense and trouble you'd
expect otherwise because ... because there is apparently a commodity
market for specialized tools and materials for door-and-trim
construction, and because there's enough of a local market where Bill
lives to support this activity with enough work to employ carpenters
who soon become experts in doors and trim. In turn, this commodity
market depends on standards. When their circular saw goes down, they
don't have to make another one from scratch.

Yes, standards crowd out customization and expressiveness, as do
monopolies (which are merely the subjection of dominant standards to
proprietary interests not beholden to the commonwealth, commandeering
many of the benefits of their network effects). But they also enable
customization and expressiveness at higher levels. (Of course we all
know this, right?) XML represents an advance over SGML because by
specifying a syntax without consideration of constraints enforced by a
schema, it enables the sort of expressiveness that Simon and I prize.
This expressiveness isn't the formal sort (XML can't say anything that
SGML can't) but only in a practical sense: I couldn't deploy a new tag
set every week (with or without a schema) if I didn't have tools that
reliably process XML syntax, allowing me to iterate my design and my
processing logic without having to pay schema overhead until I need to
enforce more rules to scale up gracefully. In other words, XML
(meaning both the standard and the commodity toolkit built on top of
it) allows me to do more with less. On the other hand, using XML also
limits me in some significant ways. The tool shapes the hand, and
pretty soon I think every data structure is a tree.

Unfortunately for me, this puts me on both sides of the debate here.
Standards are great, except when they're not. I depend on them, but
I'm also skeptical of one-size-fits-all solutions to any problem at
any level -- and most especially of one-size-fits-all ideologies or
formulas that promise to solve entire classes of problems without
getting in there and dealing with them. We see this in XML all the
time. Schema validation by itself doesn't warrant a document instance
for fitness for any process other than ... schema validation. At best,
it's a convenient proxy for helping to manage some issues of fitness
and isolate them early; and *maybe* it's an orthogonal indicator of
the likeliness of problems it doesn't detect. These capabilities can
make a schema useful at certain kinds of system boundaries. Does this
make a schema worth the effort of development, maintenance and
support? It depends. And even when it is, a schema (most especially
when elevated to the status of a standard in name or in fact) can
quickly become a sacred cow. Which is probably all by itself a good
reason for Simon not to like them.

Cheers, Wendell

Wendell Piez | http://www.wendellpiez.com
XML | XSLT | electronic publishing
Eat Your Vegetables
_____oo_________o_o___ooooo____ooooooo_^


On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 5:12 PM, Michael Sokolov
<msokolov@safaribooksonline.com> wrote:
> On 08/28/2013 04:49 PM, Bill Kearney wrote:
>>
>> When in the process of shopping for a new door I discovered it was cheaper
>> to have one custom made than using a factory item.
>>
>> This for pre-hung in frame, with both inside and outside moldings,
>> double-pane glass, drilled for lock hardware and all mahogany construction.
>> Made by a local lumber yard that has it's own door and trim shop.  Totally
>> customized to match the curve of the porch roof above it.  For about a grand
>> less.
>>
>> It did, however, take about a month to get it made.  But worth the wait,
>> for both the look and the savings.
>>
>> What does that say for standardization harming choice?  Nothing, but that
>> was a bad analogy to start with.
>
> Bill, that's fascinating.  I have to admit I didn't really investigate that
> option (although my door price less a grand would have been negative).  Like
> all examples, when you look at them carefully, they prove to be much more
> interesting than the generalizations we seem to like to make (please don't
> send boring examples to disprove this statement!)
>
>
> -Mike
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
>
> XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS
> to support XML implementation and development. To minimize
> spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting.
>
> [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/
> Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@lists.xml.org
> subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@lists.xml.org
> List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
> List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php
>