Subject: Re: Heresy? Re: DSSSL WWW Enhancements From: Christopher Walsh <christop@xxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 09:20:23 +0000 (GMT) |
> > The real problem is people's fears of the unknown. I think what would > > help more than anything else is good tutorials and examples of using > > DSSSL. Since good learning material on DSSSL is still scarce, people > > will be less likely to adopt it. > > hear hear. 100%. > I bring the newbies point of view to the debate. I first heard of DSSSL and Jade about 8 weeks ago and I had never used Lisp or Scheme before. I must admit, it was hard going to start with. However, I have just (this morning) put the finishing touches to version 0.000001 of a document infrastucture we will be using to produce printed and on-line doc for a product that will ship in about 2 months. The common source doc is heavily based on HTML, with a few bells and whistles like conditional text, automatic indexing and table of contents generation. I guess what I am trying to say is that people will use whatever tools they need to get the job done. I needed to do sgml->html and sgml->pagemaker, so I used DSSSL. Good doc and tutorials are the only things that would have made a difference. This is not to belittle the tutorials that are already available -- I would have been lost without them -- but we need more. Someone else has already made the comment about wanting to set global variables -- I can empathize with this 100%: I remember wanting to do this and having an pseudo-epiphany when I realized this was just not the way to do things. The hardest thing I had to contend with was thinking about the problem in a new way. A new syntax will not solve this problem. If you learned BASIC as your first programming language, object-oriented programming requires a shift in your mental model of programming. This does not mean that C++ should be made more like BASIC to make it easier to learn. I for one am glad DSSSL exists in the form it does -- once you get it, it's great. All I've got to do now is explore the 99% of DSSSL that I don't fully understand, and then I can get working on version 0.000002 of our SGML environment. Sorry for waffling, Chris -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHRIS WALSH [christop@xxxxxxx] \ "Permissive society? Technical Author \ It doesn't exist. SCO Client Integration Division \ I should know, I've looked for it." Vision Park, Cambridge, UK \ --Rigsby ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DSSSList info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist
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