Re: [topicmaps-comment] TMs & XTM [Was: skills to create topic maps]

[Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@garshol.priv.no>]

* Tony Coates
| 
| If you find it easier editing textual formats for topic maps, then
| that is what you get for using Emacs/vi/Notepad in the first place.
| My own experiences, XTM and otherwise, is that using a real XML
| editor for XML is certainly no *less* productive than using a text
| editor for plain text.

I think this depends on the user. Developers and other people who do
editing of text in some formal language (XML, Java, Python, whatever)
every day will most likely be much faster with a textual format than
with a graphical XML editor, simply because using a GUI is much slower
for them. This has been my experience, at least.

For non-developers this is unlikely to be true, simply because they
are used to working with their computers in a different way (more
mouse, less keyboard) and because following formal syntaxes is not
second nature to them.

| For most users, I would expect a "graphical" editor, based on some
| sort of template system that restricts what you can do so that the
| interface is more focussed on the job at hand, to be infinitely more
| useful than a text editor with even the best textual topic map
| format.  

I agree, but Robert is not most users. :-)

| [...] XTM is not the easiest thing to use XSL-T on (or at least, I
| haven't developed sufficiently good techniques yet).

It isn't. It's possible to do XTM work with XSLT, but my XSLT skills
are not good enough to do merging correctly and still keep the XSLT at
a manageable level of complexity.

| I've settled instead on using a small DTD defining my own custom XML
| format.  Much easier to work with using standard XML tools, and
| still easy to convert into XTM using an XSL-T stylesheet whenever I
| need to.

This sounds reasonable to me. As long as you have the topic map
concepts in the back of your mind when you design the schema it's just
a specialized TM interchange syntax anyway, which I think most of us
expect to see more of. (NewsML was probably the first example.)

| By the way, XML is way more than just a flexible data interchange
| format.  If that was all it was, with no tools to speak of, then
| almost nobody would care.  What makes it compelling is the technical
| infrastructure that has been built around it, [...]

I agree completely. 

| [...] However, in my earlier posts, I wasn't arguing that XTM should
| be used as more than just an interchange syntax.  Rather, I was
| arguing that it should be able to be used as an interchange syntax
| between *any* applications, and not just as a private interchange
| syntax for topic map engines.
 
It would be good if this were to happen, but personally I am a bit
concerned that XTM may be too hard to implement for this to actually
happen. We may want to develop a special no-redundancies
easy-to-process XML syntax for topic maps in order to better support
this use case. (This would also be much easier to process with XSLT,
incidentally.) 

Or we may not. This worry has been floating around in my brain for a
while, but I think we should let people gather some experience with
this before we decide one way or the other.

--Lars M.