Role of XML-DEV (was Re: XML-APP and XML-NEW)

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 12:48 PM 10/4/98 +0000, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:

>The second area where scale hits is simply the volume of postings. We are
>up to >800 last month - and these are all of high quality. I read almost
>all for impact, but don't read all in detail (i.e. I don't work through the
>logic of AFs, topic maps, pernicious mixed content, how to run MSXML, etc.). 

XML-Dev's quality level has remained remarkably high - it's invariably the
first list I read every day, followed closely by XML-L.  I'm curious about
one thing, though, and maybe the admin's can help with this.

Is XML-Dev growing?  The number of people speaking the discussion seems to
be growing slowly; I wonder how the number of people lurking is doing/has
done.

>We have the current differentiation:
>	- OASIS, xml.com for current news. If I want to find out whether something
>has been announced I look there
>	- FAQs for newbies ('what is a DDT" (sic))
>	- various specialist resources on home pages (SAX, James Tauber, James
>Clark, Steve Pepper etc.)
>	- XSL, RDF, DOM have their own lists
>	- XML-L for general discussion and announcements. We have never formally
>coordinated this but there seems to be enough difference that XML-L and
>XML-DEV have different roles.
>	- comp.text.xml for whatever people want

I really see XML-Dev as the developer forum and XML-L as the (quieter)
newbie forum.  comp.text.xml is wide open, of course, though fairly quiet
as well.  The specialist lists (for which I'd usually rather read the
archives than subscribe) perform their functions as well.  It seems like we
have a fair number of lists serving a relatively small number of people,
and serving them fairly well.

As far as general XML news sites go, we have several:
http://www.xml.com seems to update approximately weekly
http://www.xmlinfo.com seems to grow periodically
http://sunsite.unc.edu seems to change almost daily
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/sgmlnew.html also grows almost daily

Surfing multiple sites does get a bit tiring, but the news is at least of
high quality on all of them.

I'd say we have enough good places to talk; I'd just like to see more
material appearing at http://www.xmlsoftware.com and http://www.schema.net.

Simon St.Laurent
Dynamic HTML: A Primer / XML: A Primer
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth (November)
Building XML Applications (December)
http://www.simonstl.com

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