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Re: Dissillusioned about interoperability.

• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• To: "Kent Sievers" <ksievers@n...>, <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Thu, 07 Oct 1999 20:23:03 -0400

At 05:13 PM 10/7/99 -0600, Kent Sievers wrote:
>A tool like, say, a markup language other than XML?  One that only had one 
>way to mark up a simple name/value pair?  That is what we left behind.

We haven't left anything behind yet, not by a long run.  What I'm talking
about is a tool that would let you map:

everybody else's damn structures -> my structures

where you'd set things up so that you could create mappings one time, and
then your processor could identify incoming structures and map them to what
_you_ want.

If you only want name/value pairs structured one way, that's fine.

You can do this kind of work with transformations like XSLT and
architectural forms.  What I haven't seen so far is something that lets
people take 'random' XML documents and say 'make it look like this' in a
general way without requiring major pain and suffering, which I suspect is
the root of your disillusionment.  Even if such a tool only handled simple
cases, it could do a lot of good if it had a reasonable interface and easy
automation.

Mike Hatalski pointed out IBM's XML Translator Generator - it's one option,
though I'd like to see it given a prettier face.
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/aw.nsf/techmain/5F60964153C4274788256776006817AA

I'm not ready to force the world into a single model for name-value pairs,
sorry.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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