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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Inheritance in XML (was Re: Problems parsing XML)
 At 8:55 PM -0700 4/16/98, Tim Bray wrote: >At 10:35 PM 14/04/98 -0500, len bullard wrote: >>> [Chris Maden <crism@o...>:] >>> > One fundamental flaw in _XML Complete_ is Holzner's apparent belief >>> > that you must write Java code in order to do anything useful with >>> > XML. > >>Markup doesn't care. That's the beauty of it. :- > >Yes! What he said. As a result of having been a programmer since >A.D. 1979, my faith in interoperable APIs is torn and shredded. >But I think that interoperable syntax is usefully achievable. >Hence, XML. -T. > and Matthew Gertner wrote: >Eliot Kimber indicated some scepticism as to whether OO techniques have >really lived up to their hype. In terms of a controlled environment, they >have. Any C programmer who has moved onto C++ will attest that OO features >make it far easier to write extensible and maintainable code. On the other >hand, the promise that this would lead to interchangeable components that >could be used anywhere has clearly been a flop. Why? For exactly the reason >Tim mentioned in his mail: interoperable APIs never work. You can't >interface with code and expect this interface to apply to any environment >other than the one it was specifically designed for. This is the case >whatever technology you are using (DLLs, Java, JavaBeans, Smalltalk, COM, >CORBA, etc.). Hence XML. These observations about the (at least so far) lack of success with truly interoperable APIs are certainly true, and the potential of interoperable syntax "feels" right, but I wonder to what extent we may be comparing apples and oranges here. Specifically, what do we mean by "interoperable"? Interoperable APIs are hard at least in part because an incredible amount of semantics are (implicitly) built into a typical API (as is suggested by Matthew's comment). Moreover, interoperable APIs are held to a "strict accountability": the programs interacting through them must work without either syntactic or semantic errors (and, with programs, these are typically all bundled up). However, if programs must agree on the precise meanings of tagged data in order to guarantee proper operation when exchanging data (and what else does a fair understanding of "interoperable" mean in this context?), won't the semantics that must be mutually understood be (approximately) just as complex? And don't we then need to consider the mechanism(s) for achieving *that* in our comparisons? After all, it's not enough that the programs be "interoperable" in the sense that they can each "operate" (e.g., read, parse, or even approximately get the meaing) on the other's data; the operation must also be "correct" in a fairly constrained sense. I have in mind all the problems large companies are having merging data from different databases into data warehouses due to sometimes subtle differences in semantics (e.g,, of what a "customer" is), even when the data item names (corresponding to markup) are the same (or, at least, fairly regular). I'm not, here, arguing *against* the idea of interoperable syntax, but I am questioning how easy it will really be to get the degree of "interoperability" we seem to be implicitly expecting. --Frank ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Frank Manola www: http://www.objs.com Object Services and Consulting, Inc. email: fmanola@o... 151 Tremont Street #22R voice: 617 426 9287 Boston, MA 02111 xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) 
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