Tim Bray's "On XML Language Design"

Hi -

Today, I was catching up on one of Erik
Hennum's recent articles on RDF discourse models (http://www.idealliance.org/papers/extreme/Proceedings/html/2006/Hennum01/EML2006Hennum01.html).

One of Erik's references led to a recent
post by Tim Bray called "On XML Language Design" - 

        http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/01/09/On-XML-Language-Design.

At first this Bray article seemed like
a nice easy read, then it hit me - in this DITA sub-committee on learning
and training content, this is *exactly* what we're doing - we're designing
an XML language. 

At that point, I started reading the
Tim Bray article much more closely, 

It opens with this piece of advice:

        "If
you're doing to be designing a new XML language, first of all, consider
not doing it."

That grabs your attention pretty fast.

Then it goes into some excellent obversations
and discussion about syntax-oriented approaches vs. model-centric, minimalism
vs. completeness, evolution vs. stability. 

Bray really comes down strong on keeping
it simple, on being sure to design something you can implement and deploy,
because it's only when you've done this that you start to understand what
it is you're designing.

In any case, when we get to thinking
about how to actually design the DITA specialization for learning content,
it would be wise to consider some of the advice in this Tim Bray article.

John

___________________________________

John Hunt

IBM DITA Learning Architect

Lotus Education Development

IBM Software Group

phone: 617.693.5490