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Datatypes vs anarchy (was Re: Personal reply to Edd Dumbill's XML HackAr

• From: Michael Champion <mike.champion@s...>
• To: xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 09:46:14 -0500

> -----Original Message-----

> From: David E. Cleary [mailto:davec@p...]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2001 8:42 AM
> To: XML DEV
> Subject: Re: Personal reply to Edd Dumbill's XML Hack Article wrt W3C XML
Schema

> >There's no guarantee that the string 45.67 in fact represents a real
number.

> And this is supossedly a good thing? That a producer of the data and the
consumer
> of the data can disagree about what the data means? I'll take data typing
any
> day over anarchy.

Quite understandable ... but remember that this kind of thing is PERVASIVE
in the "real world" today.  If you think of Schemas (broadly defined) as a
contract between the producer and consumer of data, think of the nightmares
we would be living through if every "paper" transaction had to be defined by
a legal contract that specified details down to the level of interpretation
of each number in every field in a form.  Sure, there ARE cases when this is
important, and an army of lawyers out there who will happily charge you
$400/hour to get these details right ... but should that be the norm?  Most
of the time we muddle through and decide whether 45.67 is a rounded off
floating point number, a decimal number, or a major.minor version number by
context, heuristics, etc.  That's a problem for automated tools and the
semantic web, but not too severe a problem for human programmers and
readers.

Likewise with XML Schemas.  In my mind, they are the $400/hr lawyers of the
XML world ... when you need them, you need them badly, but most people hope
to get through their daily lives without having to deal with these @#$%s!

So the issue here is not whether there SHOULD be XML data typing
facilities -- we clearly need more than XML 1.0 offers for a lot of cases.
The issue is whether all those who can get by with informal agreements,
human-written code, etc. MUST have to deal with schemas and datatypes?  The
critics of the W3C are simply arguing that types should be LAYERED ON rather
than ENTANGLED IN to XML.

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