If It Works, It's Golden

"If it's working, it's golden." - Tom Passin

Precisely.  And if there are working examples, platinum.  What we are  
seeing in industry is a dearth of well-trained technical writers who  
are past building their hiking club's web page, or using templates and  
actually can read and apply a specification using the tools at hand.   
Instead we get wine connoisseurs who know excel and word, who have  
been shown DITA at a seminar but who have never opened 40051 or S1000D  
and proudly tell us in meetings no writer should ever have to know  
about nodes, validation, why well-formedness is important or the  
difference between XML syntax and XSD.

And then an HR problem becomes a technical problem.   I read an  
O'Reilly article about the release of the Affordable Care Act system  
in the US that was on point in one respect:  policy people are not  
technical and if the problem at hand is technical, you can't let them  
run the meetings.  On the other hand technologists tend to be  
fad-oriented, insular and only capable of working problems that  
compute so when it comes time to budget for tools they do not  
understand that yet another six month license at exorbitant costs for  
support for a tool that adds nothing but flavor is a bad choice when  
the tools at hand are still doing the job.  Sounds Good Maybe Later  
(SGML).

Next week, marshaling; this week, transforms.  Because the main thing,  
in fact the only thing, is delivery of quality product in accordance  
with the contractually obligated specifications.   Everything else is  
bullshit and while bullshit may have a place in the front office, here  
where bytes must change state before anything happens, as Dr. Goldfarb  
said, we need less of that.

Now back to this XSLT I'm debugging because for some tasks, it is golden.

len