Cart
|
[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Hobbsian processes
 Mike Champion wrote: > >... > But what if your website or service has dozens or hundreds of producers > of inputs, and they all deal with dozens of consumers of inputs. At this point it should be in everyone's interest to standardize. In fact, it is often the case that people don't even attempt to do X until they have a standard for X because they are so afraid of dealing with the situation that you describe. > ... > You have no authority to get the various consumers of messages > to get them to band together and insist on some common schema, and > you have an economic disincentive of some sort to reject > inputs that don't conform to your idea of a valid message. It's all costs and benefits. It costs one thing to figure out how to deal with a message and another thing to reject the order. You do whichever makes you the most money. You also push people to at least use extensible technologies like XML and RDF to try to minimize the extent to which your process breaks when one or two new things are added. > ... What > is to be done? Well, joining the plumbers union and learning an > honest trade comes to mind <grin> but assuming that you want to > live in the environment where no one has the authority to impose > an authoritative schema, and there are disincentives to employ > "draconian" measures when imperfect inputs are received, what > do you do? I suggest that one does the kinds of things that Walter > is talking about. I don't dispute that. But Walter claims that the more typical solution of an industry consortium is both misguided and dangerous. I don't understand that part. If it can't be done, don't do it. But if it can be done, do it! > The RSS situation seems to be a beautiful illustration of what > the dilemmas that arise in the Real World. First, there's little > agreement what "valid" RSS is. I think that the particular personalities involved may have something to do with that particular issue. Other vocabularies have stabilized. XSLT was quite confusing for a while because of Microsoft's two early phases of "experimentation". But they fell in line (as they promised to) when the real standard came out and now it is quite clear what "valid" XSLT is, or XML Schema, or SVG. Even XHTML has a pretty clear place you go to figure out what is right or wrong (if you care, which admittedly most don't). If there was sufficient money riding on getting RSS right, there would be a consortium founded and a bunch of big vendors would put their stamp on a canonical schema. > ... > Is there any reason to think that this won't be repeated many times > over as XML worms its way deeper and deeper into the business > infrastructure? Do people REALLY think that competitors will band together > to define and enfore standard schemata, when they all have an incentive > to use whatever hacks they can to take business from those who reject > invalid messages that contain sufficient information? If you don't even *define* the schema then there is a danger that the market won't even come into existence. Look at all of the companies taking a wait-and-see attitude towards web services while they "wait for standards to solidify." Once the schema exists then all of the usual market pressures will work out the way they did before there was XML. Sometimes the market leader defines the defacto profile. Sometimes they follow the spec closely. Sometimes conformance testing shames them into being strict. Sometimes they have a "strict" or "loose" flag. etc. etc. -- Paul Prescod 
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! 
Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|
|||||||||
