In all fairness I feel I should clarify some comments I made on the Python and XML/XSL/XPath post from a few days ago. My intention was’nt to post the article so I could then come back and slam the author for what I felt was bad use of XPath syntax. If I post an article it will always be because I feel the overall content is worth reading.
This article, overall, is a good read. While I still hold to the ideal that we as authors and self proclaimed experts in a particular technology have an obligation to propogate good usage and syntax of code I now realize that my comments may have been seen as an attack on this article or author overall. That was’nt my intention and apologize if in any way this is the message that was taken from my posting.
As I said, overall its a good article and worthy of your time to read it.
Cheers!
<M:D/>
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.xsltblog.com/xslt-blog-mt/mt-tb.cgi/48
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Clarification of comments...:
» very interesting. keep the good work! from
[Read More]
Tracked on March 3, 2006 08:51 AM
» home equity loans from home equity loan
home equity loan http://www.homeequityloan-zz.com [Read More]
Tracked on April 5, 2006 09:10 AM
OK. I’ll just assume the comment posting will work this time.
I already feel bad about the warlike tone of my response (and have said so in my blog), but to some extent I’m glad it perhaps made you consider more carefully what you wrote, which I still think was unfair. Unfortunately, in this very polite clarification you posted, you still don’t address the core point. You say “…I still hold to the ideal that we as authors and self proclaimed experts in a particular technology have an obligation to propogate good usage and syntax of code…” Once again you seem to mis the point that the XPath in that article was never intended as an example of elegant hand-written XPath. They were all mechanically generated.
I’m sure you’ve seen a code geneerator in action before: anything from a COM or CORBA IDL compiler to a UML code generator. The code they spit out is never anywhere close to the elegance that a good developer would produce. This is because they are machine generated. If I were writing an article on such code generators, you wouldn’t expect me to clean up the resulting syntax in the code samples, would you? Doing so would cause no end of confusion to developers.
So I still don’t understand why you’re expecting exemplary XPath syntax in an example of code generated by a simple code generator (kept simple on purpose in order to more clearly illustrate the basic techniques being discussed (which are clearly what is being demonstrated, not the use of abbreviations in basic XPath absoilute path expressions).
My whole reaction was that I was annoyed at the (IMO very unfair) accusation that I was going around sowing bad XPath practices. It seems to me very surprising that anyone who actually read the article would expect to use those code-generated XPaths as a good guide to XPath style in general. Am I missing something you saw in the article that gives you such an impression?
Once again, I do like your blog. Don’t let my reaction in this oe matter obscure that fact. Keep up the good work.
Hey Uche,
Thanks again for taking the time to comment. I think, as we obviously both agree, that its important we recognize the critique of a colleague for what it is: an effort to help one another be better at what we do.
I will accept your critique and most definitely will make sure I make use of the lesson learned: I need to be a little more careful in recognizing context before criticizing another authors work. Fair enough :)
I look forward to utilizing your Python and XML expertise in the future to learn more about this area of software development; something I know very little about but most definitely want to learn more. Thanks for what obviously is a lot of time and hard work spent helping us all better understand these technologies!
Cheers!
<M:D/>