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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Universal names vs context - was Re: Schema fragments for ever
 On Jan 31, 2004, at 8:58 AM, W. E. Perry wrote: > >> One way is to use a context-driven mechanism at runtime that >> "applies" the >> proper set of elements according to the context of (in this case) >> country of >> origin. > > he is, in fact, describing the only viable mechanism for producing > each locally > required data structure, but I do not think that he understands how > that > undercuts the very universal standardization of document forms which > he hopes > to see promulgated by the UBL, or by any similar Babel project. > Sean McGrath makes a similar point in http://www.itworld.com/nl/ebiz_ent/03252003/ " XML doc-heads are very fond of addressing - as opposed to unique names - as a way of uniquely identifying things. Their cultural preference is a direct result, I believe, of the impossibility of allocating unique names for things in richly complex hierarchical structures. ... In the relational database culture that many XML data-heads emanated from, unique naming was of paramount importance. With a record *everything* has a unique name. It simply must be so for the relational model to work. Records themselves have unique identifiers. Again, it simply must be so for the cultural ceremonies of normalization and joins and so on to function. As often happens when cultures collide, friction resulted in the XML world over this issue" Perhaps unlike Walter, I don't see this context-sensitive address (of the sort that XPath enables quite nicely) as the "only viable mechanism" -- there's a place for unique names of the RDBMS variety, but those tend to be in environments where something akin to the Académie française or an industry-wide nomenclature committee exists to enforce the standard naming conventions. The namespaces spec is, of course, designed to enable this in a decentralized way, but so far I'm not seeing a lot of compelling evidence that it eliminates more confusion than it causes ... that's basically the point Sean is getting to in his article cited above. Perhaps UBL will become the authoritative nomenclature in many real-world settings, but we shall have to see about that. In the wild, wild Web, or anywhere that there is no authoritative way of defining the names, taxonomies, ontologies, etc., I'd have to agree that context is the best guide to practical disambiguation. 
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