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Re: syntax, model

• Subject: Re: syntax, model
• From: Bill de hÓra <bill.dehora@p...>
• Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2003 12:06:34 +0100
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <200310250214.h9P2ERa23590@d...>
• References: <830178CE7378FC40BC6F1DDADCFDD1D1D51681@R...> <200310250214.h9P2ERa23590@d...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

> Dare Obasanjo wrote:
>>And I'd rather have a spec written in prose than a schema any day of the week
> Joe English wrote:
> Having all three is best (formal spec, prose spec, and sample
> instances), if they're all available.  But I think I'd still
> pick the formal spec if I were forced to choose just one.


Now that I'm out of smartass mode (sorry Dare), I can speak to this. 
Where this bites is not so much for widely published and reviewed 
specs, thought that can happen. It's for the ad-hoc (non-pejorative) 
structures that businesses come up with to get something done. Often 
this is done with samples rather than schemas. XSD is relatively new 
technolgy on the ground, RNG is newer still. But you get samples 
usually I believe, because on the ground everyone is in a hurry to 
get something out the door and formal notation is a seen as a luxury 
despite the savings made in coding effort. At Propylon, we consider 
schemata a priority and budget the time to create them, but to 
counter that, we see a lot of pre-existing data that can only be 
spec'd via samples. It's quite possible that no one person actually 
knows the range and domain of the XML structure in question. Usually 
we ask for maximal and minimal samples and reverse engineer the 
schemas from those.

Not unrelated, what does anyone think of using XSLT to specify a 
transformation between two XML structures?

Bill de hÓra
-- 
Technical Architect
Propylon
http://www.propylon.com

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@c...>
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• References:
  • RE: syntax, model
    • From: "Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@m...>
  • Re: syntax, model
    • From: Joe English <jenglish@f...>

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