- From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
- Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2008 23:51:43 -0000
- To: "'Pete Cordell'" <petexmldev@tech-know-ware.com>, <www-xml-schema-comments@w3.org>
> >> At the risk of upsetting people, why do we use the word "tableau" > >> when most people would use "table"? To me, this is what I call > >> gratuitous pomposity. > > > > Gratuitous pomposity? Nonsense, just charming eccentricity. > > As you didn't include an exclamation mark at the end (or > smiley - arghh) I'll assume this is a serious comment rather > than a joke comment... The comment was intended to be light-hearted. There are many places where the schema spec is indeed excessively pompous, and it falls into a number of categories: (a) a slightly eccentric choice of terminology, of which this is an example (b) self-justification. I think we've got rid of some of the worst examples of this (c) unnecessarily long and complex sentence structures (d) over-reliance on typographical devices that make the text harder to read, whereas typography should always strive to make it easier. Of these, I find the use of eccentric terms like "tableau" the least objectionable. The worst terminological offences are terms that appear to be used in a technical sense, but actually have no definition: an example is "coherent". Michael Kay http://www.saxonica.com/
Received on Thursday, 3 January 2008 23:52:07 UTC