From: Bob Neches ([email protected])
Date: 10/09/00
I remember my initial peevish reaction to moving from FORTRAN to ALGOL(in 1972): why do I have to learn all this syntax to write a line of ALGOL, I thought, when I can do the same thing in only six or ten simple FORTRAN statements that I already know? By the end of the course, I understood. This article reminds me a bit of that: few people really like to learn things without knowing there's a payoff. A key point in this, though, is that things will more easily take off when the tools start to hide some of the implementation complexity from users, as opposed to forcing them to wallow in it. -- Bob -----Original Message----- From: Dan Connolly [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, October 09, 2000 2:06 PM To: John Flynn Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: web worries John Flynn wrote: > > All, > > The site below contains one person's concern about the direction the web is > taking. > > http://www.zdnet.com/ecommerce/stories/main/0%2C10475%2C2636521%2C00.html Ha! The irony! Dvorak writes: " the elegant simplicity of plain HTML is being shoved aside in favor of the increasingly complex XML scene." but try "view source" on that article. This is elegant simplicity? ========== <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> if (isIE4PC) {document.write('<DIV STYLE="position:relative;top:0;left:0;width:630">');} if ((isNav3) || (isNav4)) {document.write('<TABLE WIDTH="610" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0" BORDER="0"><TR><TD VALIGN="TOP" WIDTH="142">');} </SCRIPT> ========== I find that XML simplifies life considerably. Or rather: it doesn't complicate life more than life is already complicated. The HTML specifications, for example, aren't worth much to implementors (I think they are to authors, but...). I routinely hear reports from implementors that coded to the spec, and then tried their code on the HTML that's actually out there, and spent between 3x and 10x their original investment trying to be bugward compatible. HTML is, by and large, another write-only medium, like postscript. XHTML, when used carefully, can be the basis of rich interchange. XML in general can too. For example, over the last few days, I just built some XML/XSLT tools to help me do expense reports: I export tab-delimited stuff from Quicken, then turn that into XML with a ~100-line python script, then munge the data with XSLT, turning it into RDF and doing semantically-rich queries on it. Total lines of code, including quite a bit of comments: less than 1Kloc: 175 443 3506 quicken-export/tsv2xml.py 221 466 6673 quicken-export/reportSemantics.xsl 134 294 4317 mit2000/mergeExpense.xsl 530 1203 14496 total The result is a nice looking expense report that cites the relevant MIT policies and such. Before this DAML project is all said and done, I should be able to prove, by machine (with interactive input from the authorized parties) that the expense report conforms to the relevant policies. But for now, it works. I can write XML out of one tool and read it into lots of other tools with 100% reliability. (Try that with HTML: write a document with HTML tool X; read it into tool Y; modify it a bit; write it back out; try to read it into tool X again. Do you even recognize your document?) This is stuff I just couldn't manage before tools like XSLT were avaialble. I either lived with Quicken's report formats, or I transcribed all the data, by hand, into a spreadsheet or something. The various ways people stretch HTML and javascript to approach live's problems are amazing (webturbotax completely blows me away!) but they're anything *but* "elegant simplicity". They're hacks upon kludges, and they rarely survive more than 18 month's worth of software-upgrade-turnover. XML tools, on the other hand, compose quite nicely to build big solutions out of little ones. -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/ tel:+1-913-491-0501 (office phone as of 27 Apr 2000) mailto:[email protected]?subject=pls%20call%20+1-NNN-NNN-NNNN
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