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Of course not all. But would this communication go anywhere had the mail standards not been created? It comes down to who gets to choose the choices and when. Communication is about choice but choice and consequence are coupled. XML Schemas are baroque, no doubt about it. On the other hand, given that we have very little real wide experience with them yet, we have to give that time to see what the results will be. I remember a very famous designer telling people he could not conceive of people bothering to type in tags but they do it. Humans handle complexity one simple piece at a time and then it doesn't look complex. If all TREX does is validate, how will that be any better than a DTD? If RDF enables semantic interpretation but is a bear to learn and work with, who will bother to encode metadata? Everyone stops thinking something is "too hard" once they learn it. So maybe the pain has slipped back to the programming task. XML was designed to make life easy for the programmer at the cost of the author. Now the pendulum swings. XML Schemas will take a year to two years to be fully deployed and only after that will we know how much pain there is. What I do know is that for all the simplicity XML was supposed to engender, what we have is now a heckuva lot harder than SGML. Why? Lots more features. Why? James demonstrates specious logic. The ISO standards groups were very small groups. Attendance was usually no more that eight to a dozen people and usually the same people. It is the W3C working groups that are very large groups. Large groups do create lots of features but not because people want satisfaction but because they all want to do different tasks. If you want small design groups, carefully controlled features, and the *right people*, found a company and write specification for applications. Proprietary. Then when it succeeds, submit is for a PAS. Works for Adobe. But get the requirements right. If you want OOP, do OOP but that is not markup. If you want markup do markup, but that is not OOP. If you want both from the same language, you get a very baroque result. The features of SGML were carefully controlled but the standard was old by the time the web got to it, so yes, it was feature rich at that point. SGML DTDs did not fail. They do what they are designed to do reasonably well for the user they are designed for. They aren't designed to make a programmer's task easy. It is the web work, with all its whining about simplicity that has become baroque because its features are not carefully controlled. It won't stay simple. It never does. But now we have it and them, and if what comes next is painful, well, blame the W3C and the XML designers. Them is us. >Communication without contracts is what has enabled the progresses made >by the humanity (sorry for the lawyers who read this sentence)... Dead wrong. Communication with contracts is how progress is made. It keeps the mammals from devolving from parlor gossip to swords. Len http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Eric van der Vlist [mailto:vdv@d...] Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 5:00 PM To: xml-dev@l... Subject: Re: Schemas Article "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote: > > Or maybe the SGMLers were right all along > except for requiring them in every case. > Well-formedness is a coding freedom not > necessarily extended to the user of the > coded message but even the SGMLers know > it isn't required to read the document > in every case. > > Somewhere the contract for communicating for > the duration should be expressed. Not for every kind of applications. Would you have written this mail if you had needed to write a schema to formalize a contract making sure the every reader in the world will understand each of the words in the same way you've wanted to express them? Communication without contracts is what has enabled the progresses made by the humanity (sorry for the lawyers who read this sentence)... > Lighter or > heavier makes no difference to the necessity > to trust AND verify except where trust is > proven to work and you can afford the occasional > defection. > > Besides, XML Schema is just an > application of XML. People are free to > ignore it. They just aren't free to improve it. Today, yes it's still the case. Will it still be if W3C XML Schema becomes a foundation of XML as shown by Tim Berners-Lee?
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