Is XML for the peons or the gods? (was What is XML for?)

[Paul Prescod]

David Megginson wrote:
> 
> <aside>
>  By the way, on a separate note, I find it disturbing that people like
>  Paul Prescod, Eliot Kimber, and I have morphed from the young Turks in
>  the SGML world a few months ago to the old grannies in the XML world
>  now.  It feels like the Star Trek episode where everyone aged rapidly.
>  I was in Kindergarten when the Beatles broke up, dammit.
> </aside>

Beatles? Is that like a music group? Remember the heady days of the
mid-80s when we revoloutionaries would posit that SGML was sophisticated
enough to be the serialization format for all of the world's textual data?

<FRIDAY_AFTERNOON_TIME_WASTING>
It occurs to me that compared both to those "early" days and to my
modern-day Python mailing list, we take things much too seriously in
XML-DEV. It's a good place to learn and contribute, for sure. But I think
that the crowd that gathers around a victorious instead of conquering
technology is necessarily less unified and communal. 

It is also a little bit discouraging that here and everywhere else the
needs of document processing have been shoved together with the needs of
Java object serialization and remote RPC. That's nobody's fault, but
eventually we have to figure out how to get back to advancing the state of
the art in document processing.
</FRIDAY_AFTERNOON_TIME_WASTING>

(love those long NAMELENs)

 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

Don't you know that the smart bombs are so clever, they only kill 
bad people."
	- http://www.boingo.com/lyrics/WarAgain.html

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