Re: Rant: Giving up on XML

[Siliconwriter <siliconwriter -at- comcast -dot- net>]

On Mar 14, 2007, at 7:41 AM, Gene Kim-Eng wrote:

> My point is, I'm not going to "learn XML and XML technology,"
> in order to write documents.  If I have to "learn" a "technology"
> instead of that technology evolving to support my needs, I'm
> not likely to adopt it.  And neither are most other writers whose
> companies grumble about why they need to have a copy of
> FrameMaker or Acrobat Pro instead of being able to work in
> Word and some open source PDF printer driver.
>

Let the choir sing, "Amen".

The company I work for actually uses Linux as the operating system  
for our code. Our software engineers use XML files for all sorts of  
tasks. But not one single one of those software engineers is willing  
to use any program other than Microsoft Word or a plain text editor  
to create documents. You'd think they would be early adopters of OSS,  
and that my bosses would have been very enthusiastic about my trying  
to move to XML and open source technologies. But no, they were very  
reluctant, and that should have been a warning to me. They knew  
something I didn't: this stuff is, as Gene says, not ready for prime  
time. I am bummed.
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