Re: Mapping files?

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| I don't for a moment believe that the SAM/XTM specifications will
| actually be comprehensible to your average web developer. We need
| different tutorials for them, probably ones which focus on the tools
| and the techniques.

* Guy Murphy
|
| Why?

Because it's written to be 350% unambiguous, and that doesn't make for
light reading. Those two documents aim for one single thing:
interoperability, utterly disregarding the cost to readability for
those who are not technically minded.

Feel free to look at the documents yourself and correct me if you
think they are suitable for the average web developer:

  <URL: http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-model/ >
  <URL: http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-xtm/ > 

What do you think, Guy?

| One that focuses on on the "tools and techniques" for the Web
| developers...  could you get any more patronising?

Oh, come on. XSLT may have been successfully sold to average web
developers, but I don't think they learned it by reading the spec, and
even if they did I think that spec is easier to read than the SAM/XTM
ones. (Which again are much easier to read than the RELAX-NG one.)

I'm not saying these people are stupid. What I am saying is that if we
told them "to learn topic maps you must read and understand these two
documents" they'd tell us to sod off and go do something other than
topic maps.

Different documents for different audiences. I don't see what's so
controversial about that.

| XSLT was successfully punted to the "average web developer", and I
| would personally argue that if XSLT can be handed to Web developers,
| any failing to convey TopicMaps to Web developers is not the failing
| of said developers.

I would agree. That's precisely why I am saying we should have
specifications for the implementors and tutorials for the users.
 
| Consider what you said above... you effectively said these specs
| aren't consumable Web developers. If they aren't consumable by Web
| developers who do you envisage them being consumable by? Apart from
| you and yours of course.

Implementors, primarily.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
GSM: +47 98 21 55 50                  <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >