The same thing happened with Microstar's Near and Far DTD management
tool. It became essentially uni-directional from DTD to
display. No-one could use it for production maintenance because the
author's entity structure and source expression evaporated.
The mistake discovered on day two of the product was the thinking
that users would want to use the graphical tool for *all* of the DTD
maintenance. If it had been perceived correctly that users needed to
preserve their own concept of internal modularization, declaration
ordering, commenting, etc., the product would have been designed
differently from the ground up and found a more appropriate role in
the augmentation of the development/maintenance process and not try
to be the be-all and end-all of model building.
Peter Flynn's recent legacy project discussion has revealed that more
than 20 years later the product is still being used for
visualization. And I think Tommie's coining of the term "DTD scat"
still gets used (forgive me if it was one of Tommie's colleagues who
came up with the term).
. . . . . . Ken
At 2016-05-02 21:09 -0500, Christopher R. Maden wrote:
>On 05/02/2016 08:56 PM, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>>I think one of the limitations of the idea of grammar neutrality (ie
>>freely translate the schema into the particular grammar available for
>>each tool) is this lack of entity maintenance by some converters.
>>(Not a good term) Possibly it is a bigger problem than the different
>>power of the different grammars.
>
>This is what killed EBT.
>
>This is second-hand hearsay, through a filter of 20 years, but the
>DynaBase project had multiple big-ticket pre-orders before someone
>noticed that, in parsing the SGML, it normalized away all the entity
>references, which made it useless for actual ongoing document
>management, which was its primary selling point.
>
>Fixing that would have involved changes going down to the deepest
>layers of the parser... which was just no feasible on the announced schedule.
>
>So instead of an IPO making me rich, EBT was sold to Inso (which
>made a few people rich, entirely deservedly), who proceeded to run
>everything into the ground.
>
><paul-harvey>Now you know... the rest of the story.</paul-harvey>
>
>~Chris
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