A few quotes for the xml-dev Hall of Fame

["Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>]

Hi Folks,

I picked out a few of my favorites from the ongoing discussions.

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Michael Kay wrote:

In ordinary discourse we often allow semantic drift in the way we use terminology, but in computing I think it's best to be very clear about what our technical terms mean, and when someone invents a term like "XML" and provides a definition, I think it's sloppy practice to use the term to mean something different.
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Rick Jelliffe wrote:

Information architects reading might be interested that here in Australia we are increasingly having to deal with people's names from our vibrant neighbor Indonesia, where people commonly have a single name only (e.g. Munali). It is not a family name, not a surname, and not a second name.  This causes some bother, because many local computer systems are designed to require two names.
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Toby Considine brought to our attention the term English-prime (E-Prime):

E-Prime (short for English-Prime, sometimes denoted É or E′) is a prescriptive version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be. E-Prime does not allow the conjugations of to be—be, am, is, are, was, were, been, being— the archaic forms of to be (e.g. art, wast, wert), or the contractions of to be—'s, 'm, 're (e.g. I'm, he's, she's, they're).

Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing. For example, the sentence "the film was good" could not be expressed under the rules of E-Prime, and the speaker might instead say "I liked the film" or "the film made me laugh". The E-Prime versions communicate the speaker's experience rather than judgment, making it harder for the writer or reader to confuse opinion with fact.