Re: [xml-dev] [OT] Re: [xml-dev] Lessons learned from the XML experiment

On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 4:23 PM, Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:

On 11/15/13 5:54 PM, Hans-Juergen Rennau wrote:

Frankly, I am annoyed at this criticsm, because nobody likes to be
treated in a cat & mouse fashion & receive responses riddles with little
provocations

If you thought Uche was speaking in riddles, it may well be that we speak different languages indeed.

I'm sure I'm going to regret not just continuing to ignore this pointless sideshow, as I'd said I would, but what the heck.

I suspect that how you see that sequence of exchanges depends on several things, including your position on the argument and your history with XML and on this list and related ones. Michael and I have had plenty of our own disagreements over the years, and not always in perfectly cordial exchanges, but we've seen the pattern of each others discourse and understand it. I think he saw in this case what I did as well: someone coming in with a completely new and often obnoxious pattern. For my part, once I noticed that, yes I chose to be flip in some of the bits I didn't think we could reasonably resolve without dredging up volumes and volumes of old perma-thread material. I think folks such as Michael and Simon who have been on those perma-thread knew what I was getting at in my elliptical bits, and indeed both of them proved it by expanding almost precisely as I would have done, if I'd been bothered to do so.

And that's the thing. I'm not going to bother to rehash volumes of perma-threads and the many reams f specs I've read just because someone new comes along and claims that they are just bringing the fancy new scientific method from 'round enlightened parts to this old hick backwater, and then asks me a bunch of disingenuous gadfly questions. If some of the newcomers find it annoying that I'm saving my own time by posting references that indicate a huge amount of prior discussion, then too bad. You can hold a yellow card up to me as well, but I've paid more than my dues around here and in the XML world in general, and I'll just be getting on with it.

The most hilarious thing about all this is that it's only after Michael's latest that I've realized the most fundamental misunderstanding that occurred. It seems folks thought that "XML WTF" meant "something that is the fault of XML." I guess it should have occurred to me that not everyone would realize that it means almost the exact opposite. The expression of course comes from The Daily WTF, which often brought about chuckles here, and sometimes serious discussion in its heydey (2005? 2006?) when it exposed in-the-wild abuses and perversions of XML.

http://thedailywtf.com/

But I do think based on the most recent discussions here that some of the newcomers to XML-DEV have a *lot* of reading to do in the archives of this list before they they go strutting about like the new professors on the block.

But of course that's my perspective; I don't expect to compel anyone to do so, but if you don't and enter into discourse with me such that it's obvious you haven't, expect me to become very annoying very quickly.

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