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"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote: > > The interesting application is not validation but > generation of support systems from the schema. As > has been pointed out often in the past, many > schema uses are upstream in the authoring suite. > Charlie Sorgi (then Mentor Context) pointed this > out in the late eighties about SGML: a DTD is as much a > specification for the authoring tool as anything > else. Not that validation is not useful. Like > so many things, it should be useful on demand, a > service, not necessarily a constraint. > True, but I'd take it further. The main purpose of a schema language for me is specifying data structures, regardless of automated support for validation *or* authoring. First time I used XML schemas was DSD, just as a spec, for specifying the messages we would recieve from another company's insurance quote engine. No automated support at all, just three or four pages of agreed DSD schema. First message that came through, parsed perfectly. Makes a change from the years I spent doing client-server programming where agreeing, parsing and debugging buffers would take typically take half the project. Francis.
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