Re: Giving up on XML

Subject: Re: Giving up on XML
From: "Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>
To: "techwhirlers" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:23:06 -0700

I think Mike's coments and my own point to one of
the big holes in the some of the arguements offered
by XML proponents (at least some of the ones posted
on this list): namely that an XML-based document
must inherently be "heirarchichally structured," and
that there is no point in working in XML if you are
not looking to be in an "enforced document structure"
environment.

In fact a document's structure can take any form the
author and product owners decide will support their
documentation needs, and there are other potential
uses for the type of information chunking that XML
lends itself to that don't necessarily have to have
anything to do with "heirarchical structuring." For
the vast majority of techwriters who suddenly find
themselves faced with the prospect of building a
document set from a directory full of little files
with .xml extensions, this is the big issue that XML
has the potential to address, but is failing to.

Thinking of XML as a "structured authoring language"
rather than a document markup language that can
support structured document authoring *and other
uses" is what keeps XML the domain of people
who either like to do the under-the-hood tinkering
or have the budget to pay big bucks for configuration
services and makes it continue to look "not ready for
prime time" to the rest of us..

Gene Kim-Eng


----- Original Message -----
From: "Janice Gelb" <janice -dot- gelb -at- sun -dot- com>

I don't mean to be getting into an individual
catfight with anyone, really, I don't. However,
this seemed to me to be illustrative of one of
the problems that structured languages like SGML
try to prevent: individual writers deciding based
on their own aesthetics or personal views on
documentation how their documents should be
structured and styled rather than all documents
from a company having the same predictable structure
and look and feel.

If Mike works on his own as a sole writer at
a company and the company is happy with his
aesthetics and his professional judgments about
structure, then he's right that his tools and
environment are working fine for him. But in
an environment where documentation sets are
being produced by numerous writers and text
potentially could be reused in different outputs,
I think that consistent structure and appearance
is an important benefit to be gained by using a
structured authoring language.

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References:
Rant: Giving up on XML: From: siliconwriter
Re: Giving up on XML: From: Gene Kim-Eng
Re: Giving up on XML: From: quills
Re: Giving up on XML: From: Gene Kim-Eng
Re: Giving up on XML: From: quills
Re: Giving up on XML: From: Mike Starr
Re: Giving up on XML: From: Janice Gelb
Re: Giving up on XML: From: Mike Starr
Re: Giving up on XML: From: Janice Gelb
Re: Giving up on XML: From: Gene Kim-Eng
Re: Giving up on XML: From: Janice Gelb

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