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John Atchley wrote : >That said, I think "extensibility" is a more important attribute than >"self-describing." I see flexibility as XML's greatest strength - >ironically it seems that many of the "advances" in related fields serve >mostly to constrain or destroy that flexibility by burdening XML with >validation info that more rightfully should be in the >application domain. You're right, but I think that trying to deal with the extensibility problem on the data format side only is bound to fail. I don't know of a way to achieve true schema extensibility which does not require to modify each and every program that use it (unless you schema extensibility is of a very simple kind, like replacing a 1..5 occurence count by 1..*). The simplest solution to this problem seems to allow the association between a schema and some behaviour, but this gets very political (see my previous post about embedding code within schemas). If think that there are plenty of other problems to gnaw before coping with the complex problem of extensibility, and that may be the reason why there are so few "advances" towards flexibility, and so much efforts to reduce flexibility in schemas, so that they become effectively processable. Regards, Nicolas Lehuen http://nicolas.lehuen.com/
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