RE: [xml] encoding tutorial draft

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 08:56, Labib Iskander, Marcus wrote:
> Hi Igor,
>
> alright, alright. Let's stress the necessity of conversion. But I still
> believe that the majority of readers of the tutorial, will only need the
> hint and know what this is all about. I would rather point people not
> familar with the idea of encoding to some different source of information
> and help the rest to a fast start using libxml. However, since I am not
> going to write the tutorial (nobody would like it anyway :), everything is
> fine with me!!

This may sound a cop-out, but you're both right. Minimal will be of use
to some, maximal to others, but since bits are largely free, we can
easily do both, which is what I'm trying to do in the next draft I'm
working on. (There's a pretty healthy debate over this question of
minimalism versus maximalism in the computer documentation community.
The minimalists tend to hold most of the ground, but I find the
maximalist argument particularly persuasive in the free software world.
Here, a big part of the philosophy involves having real ownership of
one's computing environment, and a deep understanding rather than merely
a functional one is of greater value, it seems to me.)

> Maybe I am too biased, though. I just started programming C but am quite
> familar with Java, XML, MIME, ...
> I quickly scanned through the tutorials before my first try on libxml and
> loved it being so short :)
> But thats just my personal perception ;) I am also very pleased with reading
> libxmls source because I am learning this way.
>
> Cheers,
>   Marcus
>
> PS: Am I mistaken that every introductory text on XML contains a chapter
> about encoding?

No, probably not. But you may be mistaken in thinking that the audience
for this documentation has such a book. :-)

Cheers,
John
-- 
John Fleck
jfleck inkstain net (h) jfleck abqjournal com (w)
http://www.inkstain.net http://www.abqjournal.com

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