I think most of us agree that namespaces, as they have
turned out, are looking less and less like a real
solution, and more like a problem...
Murray Altheim wrote:
>
> Eric Armstrong wrote:
> >
> > Murray Altheim wrote:
> > >
> > > ...One of our engineers did a fairly comprehensive study
> > > of document "components" with an eye on reducing translation costs.
> > > Sun localizes its document pool across quite a number of languages,
> > > which is very expensive, so the idea was to try to save some money
> > > hiring translators.
> > >
> > > What he found was that the cutting and pasting of such components
> > > was frought with difficulty, as they were originally written by a
> > > [supposedly] intelligent author for a particular purpose in a
> > > particular context. That these components (let's really call them
> > > "document fragments") are somehow modular and reusable seems rather
> > > suspect to me...
> > >
> > This may come as a bit of a surprise, but I totally agree with
> > you. When a document is written, transitions play such a key role
> > that the idea of "modular reuse" is effectively moot.
> >
> > Another way of saying that is: Given the tools we have at our
> > disposal, the work products we have created are ill-suited for
> > modular reuse.
>
> Agreed.
>
> > However, not all classes of documents fall into that category.
> > Here are three that do not:
> >
> > * A granular email system.
> [...]
> > * An automated (ideally human-mediated FAQ system)
> [...]
> > * A DKR
> [...]
> > Now, these are systems that *could* benefit from modularly
> > reusable material. When systems exist which expedite the
> > authoring and access of such material, we may well see a shift
> > towards more modular writing. (Much material will still depend
> > on sequencing and transitions, however, so not everything will
> > fit into that category.)
>
> I might add to your list XTM topic maps. <topic> elements need to
> commonly be reused as topic maps are merged, but upon merging the
> IDs used as identifiers, perhaps "published subject identifiers"
> may be lost.
>
> It's not that I don't understand or agree to the need for modular
> reuse (heck, I wrote the modular XHTML DTDs so I'm big on m12n),
> but that as you say, I don't either know how quite to proceed
> given our current pool of tools and the direction XML is going
> with namespaces et al, which may *seem* to promote such things
> but seems to me to simply be getting inordinately complex.
>
> Murray
>
> ...........................................................................
> Murray Altheim, SGML/XML Grease Monkey <mailto:altheim@eng.sun.com>
> XML Technology Center
> Sun Microsystems, 1601 Willow Rd., MS UMPK17-102, Menlo Park, CA 94025
>
> america was once a paradise
> of timberland and stream
> but it is dying because of the greed
> and money lust of a thousand little kings -- archy (1927)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Tue Aug 21 2001 - 17:58:06 PDT