Learning Albanian is presumably no more difficult than learning English. But the choice of language in which to write scientific articles and conduct business is English - for "most" folks. Simply because it's more ubiquitous, thanks to the first Queen Elizabeth.
Learning XML requires "experience" and "tutorials/lessons/documentation", to be sure. But XML has more ready applications than just e-business. Thus, it's far more likely that folks will spend the energy and time learning it (rather than EDIFACT or X12 syntax) if they already haven't done so. There's a viral effect. I don't know where your "here" is. But, yes, like the children at Lake Woebegone, all the monkeys of Columbus are above average. William J. Kammerer Novannet, LLC. Columbus, OH 43221-3859 . USA +1 (614) 487-0320 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andres Tomlin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "'William J. Kammerer'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "'EDI-L Mailing List'" <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, 25 January, 2005 04:43 AM Subject: RE: [EDI-L] Gentran:Server for Unix Question Every one of "the millions of people" who know this XML "trivia" (as opposed to EDIFACT "arcana") have learnt it in the same way that the "few hundred folks" who know EDIFACT did. They learnt it from experience, from assistance or from tutorials/lessons/documentation. Monkeys may be smarter in Columbus but XML is not so ubiquitous around here that everyone knows how to develop in it. I did not know the escape sequences in XML but then I don't need to. And millions of people don't know EDIFACT escape characters. Because they don't need to. They are both easy to implement when you know how. Andres. -----Original Message----- From: William J. Kammerer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 24, 2005 10:46 PM To: EDI-L Mailing List Subject: Re: [EDI-L] Gentran:Server for Unix Question Chris, one nice thing about XML is that this business of the "quote" would never have arisen as an issue. Of course, in XML there are special characters like ampersand (&) and the left angle bracket (<) that can't appear in their literal form within data, but there are standard escape sequences such as "&" or "<". You might say this is analogous to the EDIFACT situation where "?" is used to escape delimiters, but there is a BIG difference: everyone in the world who's made a web page with HTML is familiar with the concept. There are literally millions of people who know this XML trivia, but I would wager that only a few hundred folks in the entire world know the escaping arcana from ISO 9735 EDIFACT syntax. And perhaps only a few dozen know whether or how Sterling's Gentran:Server accommodates this EDIFACT standard technique. That's the beauty of XML: it's so ubiquitous, any monkey walking in off the street knows the syntax - or is expected to. With practically all syntax considerations out of the way - handled in a standard manner understood by every programmer - folks will finally be able to concentrate on their e-business applications. William J. Kammerer Novannet, LLC. Columbus, OH 43221-3859 . USA +1 (614) 487-0320 . Please use the following Message Identifiers as your subject prefix: <SALES>, <JOBS>, <LIST>, <TECH>, <MISC>, <EVENT>, <OFF-TOPIC> Access the list online at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
