Re: The first five minutes ... a thought experiment (long)

I can't help thinking about Robin Berjons session at the end of
xmlprague<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZqPBuWcq5E#t=28468>about how
HTML has been and will continue to successfully evolve and
improve itself. HTML has JavaScript which allows developers to extend HTML,
and then the extensions which proves useful and popular are standardized in
future HTML versions. XProc does not have such a powerful way of creating
extensions. I won't argue for JavaScript support in XProc, but I think it
might be nice to have something more powerful than "just" being able to
define custom atomic steps. Custom compound steps would be neat (but I
realize it's probably not going to happen in v2). Maybe even some form of
higher order functions(/steps). I haven't been thinking too thoroughly
about this but there are limits to what one can do with custom atomic steps.


Jostein


On 17 February 2014 17:21, David Cramer <david@thingbag.net> wrote:

> On 02/17/2014 07:40 AM, James Fuller wrote:
> > Many, many people repeated to me that XProc does poorly in the first
> > five minutes, in fact, it takes several sessions before basic concepts
> > crystallize. Many people give up at this stage but those that make it
> > through, turn into hard core XProc users, as they have run up and over
> > the learning curve.
>
> Likewise, for many users the xproc pipeline is something you get working
> and leave alone for months. By the time you need to make a change to it,
> you've forgotten the concepts and face the difficult "first five minutes
> (hours?)" problem again.
>
> There's a common trade-off between "making easy thing easy" and "making
> hard things possible". XProc indeed came down firmly on the "make hard
> things possible" side of that trade-off at the expense of making easy
> things easy.
>
> Perhaps some user stories/epics would help?
>
> As the maintainer of an xml publishing tool chain, I would like to
> replace my kludgy Ant or make tool chain with XProc.
>
> Then focus on what makes each story hard.
>
> I have to say though that once you have it working, it's great!
>
> Regards,
> David
>
>
>