Re: Proprietary format

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 4589

Posted by subs
2005-11-13 22:35:59

>Steve,
“Here is a less egregious, but nevertheless aggravating and time consuming, variant of “lock in.” I am speaking, in particular, of Maple Pro (http://www.crystaloffice.com), although other programs may have had the same problems.”

In my opinion there is no acceptable reason for making conversions as difficult as you’ve outlined. It is a great way to alienate your customers and in your case loose them.

We’ve done four updates to the Surfulater Knowledge Base structure in the past 12 months. New fields were added, internal representation of dates changed, new article templates added etc. and each time this has been totally automatic and invisible to the user, as it should be.

There are several reason why we’ve been able to do this. First and foremost we knew from the outset that it wasn’t possible for us to get things right from day one so we designed a database update process into the core of Surfulater. Second using XML makes certain changes very easy, hence the name “eXtensible” Markup Language.

XML has been termed the ASCII of the future, which is a nice simple way to look at it. As previously said it is human readable and editable in any plain old text editor. But at the same time it allows for rich structuring and manipulation of information.

XML may morph into something else in the future, but you will always know you can access your information as long as it continues to use plain ASCII text.

I’ve been writing software for over 20 years and seen all the hype come and go more times than I care to remember, but I have to say that IMO the hype over XML is justified, and not to be underestimated.

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