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Subject:Re: Giving up on XML From:"D. Michael McIntyre" <michael -dot- mcintyre -at- rosegardenmusic -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Wed, 14 Mar 2007 01:59:04 -0500
On Wednesday 14 March 2007 2:01 am, Gene Kim-Eng wrote:
> OTOH, it is possible that structured XML will become more
> cost-affordable in the same way that websites did, as today's
> junior high students learn to work in XML as part of the
> process of writing home-brewed games so that we can hire
> them as $10/hr interns to do the hands-on work of structuring.
I wouldn't count on it. Today's junior high students are consumers, not
producers. I know several of them personally, and I can't remotely picture a
bunch of them crawling away from Runescape or Worlds of Warcraft or their
favorite IM service or their cell phones long enough to do something like
this. They don't know anything about how anything works, and don't want to
learn.
It's a far different world from the one I grew up in for sure. I remember
helping John Carmack diagnose bugs in DOOM. Look at where John Carmack is
today. Wow. What do you bet he would no longer answer my emails?
But these days, all the people who make something like this happen are "out
there," on the other side of a screen, or the inside of a plastic wrapper or
something. The kids hanging out on Runescape think it's really cool to have
a job making pies in a virtual world all day, and that has taken the place of
all the backyard home brew stuff as far as my eye can see from here.
That's an interesting line of thought. Here I am, product of the days when
most of the kids I knew didn't even have a tape recorder for their C64s. I
eventually found my way to Linux, and got back to my own junior high days in
spades. I started hacking on a world-class application that a bunch of us
have been cobbling together in our spare time for years. I up and started
writing documentation out of the blue, and eventually developed it into a
whole new trade by the seat of my pants.
I'm carrying the spirit of my own junior high days with me, and it is driving
all of this. What will today's kids be doing in 20 years? Making even
higher resolution pies with more realistic virtual fillings all day to earn
fake money in a fake world?
Sadly, that seems more likely than any vision of the next generation that
involves kids tinkering with XML in their back yards.
--
D. Michael McIntyre
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