RE: [namespaceDocument-8] 14 Theses, take 2

At 07:50 PM 18/02/02 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>I'm not sure that I trust your survey to produce the right answer (and I
>believe it hasn't).  The problem isn't with your estimations or your
>projecting the answer to more people, but with the kind of people you
>spoke to.
>
>Given what little I know of BEA and BEA's customers, I'd wager that
>nearly every one of the developers you spoke to was a programmer, likely
>a programmer used to working with OOP methodologies, tools, and
>languages, and/or relational databases.  

Let's assume you're right about Dave's sample.  Speaking for myself,
I don't have much of a problem with taking the perceptions of
programmers as important.  At the end of the day, you can make a
strong case that the W3C exists basically to write down rules for
programmers to follow so that the Web keeps working and with any
luck gets a little better.  Given that, why not align our language
with the perceptions of programmers wherever possible?

Having said that, Simon does well to highlight that the OOP
world-view may pose dangers in this respect - the markup-language
core philosophy lives on a different planet than OOP comes from.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't write OOP code to process markup,
doesn't mean you shouldn't serialize objects as XML, just means
you have to be careful whose sandbox you're playing in. -Tim

Received on Tuesday, 19 February 2002 00:00:29 UTC