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At 12:23 PM -0500 12/9/10, David Lee wrote: >Is Hand Authored XML really an important issue nowadays ? Depends on what you mean by "really important". Much of this discussion seems to be based on the premise that if "I", or "the people I know and care about" don't need something then nobody who matters needs it (or worse, nobody needs it). And, in some cases, the discussion seems to have gone all the way to "I don't need it so it is clutter so you shouldn't have it". Are there people who hand author XML? Yes. And more often there are people who fix XML by hand. Are all of these people XML Geeks? No! Many of them are content experts, and some of them are clerical/support staff with no programming skills at all. I work in a world in which XML users find entities and mixed content essential, make effective use of DTDs, and find clarity more important than terseness. In this world document models and document processing infrastructure are stable for years while content changes constantly, so it is important to optimize for content creation and use, not for modeling and support programming. (Making life easier for XSLT programmers is insignificant compared to making it easier for document authors, for example.) Yet in many ways these users have the same problems with XML than many of you have been discussing: namespaces are mysterious, encoding errors can be difficult to detect and can do significant harm, and acceptance of XML would be far more widespread if it were simpler. Is "hand authoring" a critical use case? Yes, unless you declare that XML no longer needs to support its original users. -- Tommie -- ====================================================================== B. Tommie Usdin mailto:btusdin@m... Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Phone: 301/315-9631 Suite 207 Direct Line: 301/315-9634 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in XML and SGML ======================================================================
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