Re: [xml-dev] Software lock in?

["Andrew S. Townley" <ast@atownley.org>]

Hi guys.  Long time.

> On Mar 22, 2017, at 11:50 PM, Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> Shlomi and all, hello.
> 
> On 22 Mar 2017, at 14:11, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> 
>> I don't see how this is particularly related to XML or developing using XML. It
>> seems offtopic here and there should be more appropriate forums to discuss it.
>> Or am I missing anything?
> 
> For what it's worth, I don't think this story is particularly related to XML; but then I don't think that xml-dev is particularly related to XML either.
> 
> I didn't think the John Deare story was obviously off-topic for this list.
> 
> I now know a large fraction of what I need to know about the technicalities of XML as such.  I still read xml-dev because a good fraction of the people on it have spent a long time thinking carefully about structured information, and are willing to talk about that through the prism of XML.  Thus 'xml-dev' is, for me, a list about structured information, not about XML.
> 
> (Which is to say: the pointy-bracket-thing has been the least interesting thing about XML for the last 20 years).

I think this is a great point Norman.  Those people new to the list didn’t participate in some of the general discussions on a wide variety of philosophical and cultural aspects to information around 10 years ago now, which is unfortunate, because I believe that those types of discussions embody the real spirit and purpose of this list.

As Normal said, there are a lot of really smart people here who have lots of experience dealing with information management problems and the business environments in which those challenges arise that should be periodically be brought up so that we don’t continually reinvent the wheel.

Unfortunately, the technology industry has about a 20-30 year cycle of coming up with shiny new solutions to problems that have been previously solved.  Normally, we do it a little worse than before because we forgot all the lessons the “old guys” learned the first time around, and we think we can do it better.

Without attempting to offend those on the list as “old guys”, this is one of the bigger collections of this kind of knowledge I know because all of these problems are about information and/or interoperability at some stage, and SGML and derivatives are the best we’ve managed to do to solve these issues.

As Norman said as well, the pointy brackets are far, far away from the real problems that need to be solved.  Tooling and correct implementation is important, but we can’t ever lose sight of why we’re building those tools in the first place.

Of course, there’s plenty of advice and support about the pointy-bracket problems here as well. :)

Thanks for originally sharing the concerns, Steve, and thanks to everyone for the discussion.

Cheers,

ast

> 
> All the best,
> 
> Norman
> 
> 
> -- 
> Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
> SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
> 
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--
Andrew S. Townley <ast@atownley.org>
http://atownley.org