On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Melinda Shore
<melinda(_dot_)shore(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
What I find rather puzzling here is that most of the defenders of the
status quo are saying 'document format is really no big deal, why make
a fuss'.
?? I haven't seen anybody argue that, actually, and it would
be odd if they did.
I see numerous statements of that form in the thread.
I am in class E. I find being required to edit documents in
teleprinter format to be very insulting to me personally.
That's another odd argument, although it does tend to
support that this is a matter of individual sensibilities.
As nearly as I can tell, people who like to work lower in
the stack tend to prefer certain kinds of formats and
people who work higher in the stack tend to prefer others.
People who don't like strongly-typed languages probably aren't
going to be enthusiastic about strongly-typed document
formats. It could come down to tastes and possibly
to comfort level with various tools, and it seems unlikely
to me that haranguing people about it will change their
personal relationships with the various technologies.
And people wonder why the applications people have mostly deserted to
W3C and/or OASIS.
I don't see the relevance of strong typing. When I worked on routing
level issues I was using formal methods to specify them. It does not
get any more strongly typed than Z/VDM.
One of the reasons I prefer using XML for document preparation is that
it allows me to use automated tools to assemble / validate individual
components of the spec. For example when I was working on SAML 1.0 I
had scripts that generated the schema and documentation from a source
file and then validated the examples against the schema.
--
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