Colonialism, SAX, Java, and Namespaces

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 04:34 AM 2/6/99 -0600, Paul Prescod wrote:
>I also do not buy the thesis that it elitist to recommend that "average
>developers" not waste their time learning an abstraction until
>infrastructure and context becomes available in order to use it. There are
>many technologies that I expect will be relevant to average developers at
>some point in the future but are not now.

Well, I guess we'll see what the average developers do, and how they
respond to such attitudes and their results in the specs.  Speaking for
myself as an 'average developer', I find this view infuriating, and a poor
excuse to avoid the extra effort needed to make specs more immediately
usable and comprehensible. On the other hand, maybe some developers don't
care and it may in the long run have no significant impact.

We've been over this too many times, so I'll end here with a plea to spec
developers and their explainers.  Make your specifications as
comprehensible as you can to as wide an audience as you can, so that all of
us can spend more time writing implentations and less time debating what
the specs mean.  


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

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