“If anything, the, hmmm, real world is anything but orderly”

Which is why the humans are in the loop.  Life is the best entropy reducer.  .

Sampling works.  Slow but it works.  Feedback systems will find a stable set even given multiple controls.  Trouble is, humans are all global variables.  Unless the control is keeping track, they converge around social systems instead of directed task systems.  Where social systems dominate, linear predictability is not as important as proximate predictability.  They are stable in the local domains and will resist global values if they contravene local preference.  Sampling is the least intrusive basis for feedback.

Syntax preferences are styles too.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Cox, Bruce [mailto:Bruce.Cox@U...]
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2012 5:32 PM
To: Greg Hunt; Petite Abeille
Cc: xml-dev
Subject: RE: Should one adopt the tag naming convention of an existing XML vocabulary or create one's own tag naming convention?

To give an example, the patent business model has been very stable for about a hundred years.  True, the vocabulary has changed, but since the Patent Cooperation Treaty came into effect, even that has been fairly stable.  The more “abstract” the process, the more stable over time: invent, apply, examine, grant or reject, publish.  Those five steps describe virtually every patent office in the world.  Although there have been about four major standards for the vocabulary since 1970, the differences are in the details, not the basic concepts, and have been driven largely by advances in technology and our understanding of it and our need for it, but not by changes in business practice.

Bruce B Cox

OCIO/AED/Software Architecture and Engineering Division

571-272-9004

From: Greg Hunt [mailto:greg@f...]
Sent: 2012 February 6, Monday 17:15
To: Petite Abeille
Cc: xml-dev
Subject: Re: Should one adopt the tag naming convention of an existing XML vocabulary or create one's own tag naming convention?

You are constructing a straw man: I didn't use any of those words and you may have missed the point.  The terminology and usage in the business domain is more stable and consistent than the collective opinions of a development team that is working independently of the business domain.  The fact that the world changes and is messy does not mean that developer convenience trumps business usage.