Re: [xml-dev] Please stop writing specifications that cannot beparsed/pr

[Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>]

Thank you Tommie for expressing this more elegantly than I did.

On 27/05/2023 13:34, B Tommie Usdin wrote:
> [...specialists...] insisting that they make the time and devote the
> energy to learn skills outside their area of expertise is an effort
> to dilute their genius, and likely to fail.
This is why the expectation that a specialist in some other area will 
learn XML and an XML editor is misplaced. To them it is excise: unwanted 
and unnecessary, no matter how clearly its utility is explained.

> [...] I want the geeky hackery people to make it so easy to do
> things we know will be long-term helpful (such as create standards
> in tractable, long-term stable formats) that the specialists can do
> it without knowing anything about it.
That is a sort of holy grail: that users will be able to create and 
maintain their document in meaningful XML without knowing they are doing 
it. It's getting closer but it still requires a lot of front-loading to 
make the interface talk to the users in their domain vocabulary.

(There is a marginally related hurdle to overcome among those who are 
unaware of the conventions of documents; who don't know what a heading 
is, or a paragraph, or a list, or a table; or italics, or bold.)

> Our win will come not when we bully the ignorant into learning our 
> way but when we make our way easy, invisible, and attractive to 
> people who are paying attention to other things.
Which is why it is easier¹ for the non-XML-expert user to signal (for 
example) a product name by double-clicking it and picking "Product name" 
from the drop-down menu that appears when they click the [I] button.
They get the italics they expect; the organisation gets the 
<productname> element. Or indeed any of the dozen or so other reasons 
for wanting italics :-)

Peter

¹ As opposed to clicking Insert Element and picking productname from a 
giant list. The physical effort is the same, but the garnering of intent 
via the interface is less excise for the user. And faster to train for.