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RE: Whitepapers and ScreenShots of Office 11 XML Featur es

• To: 'Paul Prescod' <paul@p...>
• Subject: RE: Whitepapers and ScreenShots of Office 11 XML Featur es
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2002 12:37:47 -0600
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

I'd consider that farfetched except I recently 
saw precisely that done.  The programmer said, 
"XML's just a string" and sent the customer a 
rather complicated document for how his "XML string" 
was to be prepared.  Seems he didn't want to 
bother with EBNF either.  Problem is, his code 
is now fielded because his managers didn't want 
to take time to understand it either.  If XML is 
taken to mean a platform instead of syntax per 
XML 1.0, the phrase from the Pete Seeger song, 
"Neck deep in the big muddy when the old fool 
said to push on" comes to mind.

Good DTDs aren't that hard to learn to read. 
They can be expensive to create.  That does 
vary by project.
  
If a programmer can't read a DTD, I'd be inclined 
to relieve him of responsibility for a project. 
If a user has to read the DTD to use the software 
correctly, I'd be inclined to relieve the programmer 
of responsibility for a project.  If either has only 
view source as the means to figure out what is or 
isn't a valid document, I'd feel inclined to 
accept being relieved of a project.

What one tolerates varies by who the product is 
intended to work with.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@p...]

But how would you feel about an XML parser implementor who 
figured out how to implement XML only by 
examining instances and not by reading the productions in the spec? 

Surely you wouldn't accept that as an excuse for a broken XML parser or 
WSDL parser in an expensive application server or database server: "Oh, 
we didn't read the grammar/DTD."

That said, projects vary in their tolerance for misunderstanding.

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