13 May 98

By Paul Ford

The Writing Life

I had to work over the weekend at work, and it threw off my schedule. So this week, I didn't write a thing.

Actually, I've written a hundred things. But each item has been something like, "A Technical Proposal for [Very Big Client]" and "Systems Administration Documentation for [The Name of My Company]." Sexy stuff that allows me to write such sensual, liquid prose as:

As a tradeoff for its greater flexibility, XML is more complicated and represents a greater learning curve than HTML in implementation. Despite this learning curve, creating raw XML documents should actually require less work than creating HTML documents, because there will be no design work at the page-by-page level. Implementing XML also requires more planning than implementing HTML, and more work that could be considered as "programming," as opposed to "markup." For most browsers, XML will work in conjunction with HTML, not in its place. (See "An XML System," below.)

I think I've done some decent things with characterization, above. Do you get a sense that HTML is sort of beaten down and tired, while XML is coming out like a boxer? Does the parenthetical statement "(See 'An XML System,' below.)" fill you with anticipation? Damn straight it does.

That's why I'm a writer.