the death of the black box

[Lisa Rein]

Wow I thought I was the only one the used the Phantom Tollbooth as a
bible!

My concern is that the eventual realization of this "big picture" might
get crippled if we allow this fear of it to continue to be instilled
into the masses.  People want XML functionality, and they want it now --
THEY SAY. But when you start really talking to these businesses, they
don't even realize what it has to potential to accomplish.  

So let's slow down a bit so we don't have anymore disasters like it
appears this Namespace thing resulted in, and instead, perhaps we should
question the overall viability of technologies, such as RDF, or anything
else who appear to be dysfunctional until "things that will be defined
in another document" miraculously appear.  If we're designing an
architecture, it would be pretty silly to build the house on top of
screwjacks because somebody's got the nicest rug they want to put in,
yes?  It seems to me that's where were headed.

I thought the explanation Eliot gave the other day was very straight
forward and enlightening -- and that says a lot about how fundamental
some of these issues are -- because let's face it guys --compared to
most of the people in this list, I'm a beginner big-time!   
Yet recently I've been able to enable all sorts of different XML
functionalities at many levels -- and I'm not even getting good at Java
yet! 

I'll admit that I've had to rely on the advice of a comrade or two to
get the job done....in fact, alright, I've always had to rely on the
advice of a comrade or two -- but only at the mailing-list intensity
level that we are conversing right here -- for maybe ten or fifteen
minutes -- that's doesn't even count as an obstruction in my book.

My point is exactly what Eliot always says -- A lot of this is *NOT*
rocket science -- as many would have people believe.  If it's ooooh soo
complicated, then scardie-cat developers will have to buy a black box to
do everything for them.  If the world were to discover just how basic
some of this stuff is -- they might never buy a black box again!

And would that really be so bad?  :-)


lisa


W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
> 
> At 07:45 AM 4/2/98 -0800, Roy Tennant wrote:
> >Sometimes the best solution is NOT the most thorough or general one, but
> >the simplest.
> 
> The problem is that the definition of "best" changes with the use scenario.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Eliot
> --
> <Address HyTime=bibloc>
> W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer
> Highland Consulting, a division of ISOGEN International Corp.
> 2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 95202.  214.953.0004
> www.isogen.com
> </Address>
> 
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