Balisage Paper: Break up the Bundle; Sell the Components
B. Tommie Usdin
President
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.
B. Tommie Usdin is President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy specializing in XML for textual documents. Ms. Usdin has been working with SGML since 1985 and has been a supporter of XML since 1996. She chairs Balisage: The Markup Conference conference. Ms. Usdin has developed DTDs, Schemas, and XML/SGML application frameworks for applications in government and industry. Projects include reference materials in medicine, science, engineering, and law; semiconductor documentation; historical and archival materials. Distribution formats have included print books, magazines, and journals, and both web- and media-based electronic publications. She is co-chair of the NISO Z39-96, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite Working Group and a member of the BITS Working Group and the NISO STS Standing Committee. You can read more about her at http://www.mulberrytech.com/people/usdin/index.html and see some of her photos on: flickr.
Abstract
The XML market has been moderately successful selling a package that includes: some philosophies (declarative markup and generic markup), a syntax, some programming languages (XSLT), some associated specifications, and some tools. We tell would-be users that there are significant advantages to creating, managing, and deploying their content our way, and if they cannot do that they should up-convert their content as soon as possible. This way they will be able to do multiple things with it, use many tools, be vendor independent, and they may find that their documents can suddenly play the piano and tap dance. They should use explicit, generic markup. AND they must, we tell them, use pointy brackets. AND they must leave Perl and Python in the dust and commit to XSLT (or iXML and XSLT). AND all of their code must be declarative and side-effect free. We tell them that their documents are trash, the programs they have worked for years to master are useless, and they are once-again beginners. We push this as an all or nothing proposition.
Not only is this approach arrogant and off-putting, it is wrong. And we are beginning to see this. There is no essential link between generic markup and pointy brackets. The power of declarative markup is distinct from descriptive markup. XSLT and much of the rest of the XML tool stack CAN be used in other environments. It is time we stopped insulting our would-be users, customers, colleagues and their (often highly successful) documents and environments. It is time we unbundled this package and helped people use the parts that work for them in their contexts.