[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: A Plea for Schemas
Tim Bray wrote: > I share the doubt that a grand unified schema repository will be tractable > to build & maintain. I also am enthusiasm-challenged because in my (lengthy) > experience with XML and its ancestors, I have only ever seen machine-readable > schemas put to use in one application: namely the use of DTDs in > hand-authoring XML documents. Clearly the addition of datatypes and so on > should enable all sorts of other goodies but we are all placing bets on > an as-yet-unrealized future. So some degree of skepticism is in order. This is an easy issue to be sceptical about. It is worth keeping in mind, however, that these historical arguments ("never needed it so I probably never will") neglect the fact that many of the pieces of the puzzle have been in place only recently (or are still being worked on): * The right mindset: until very recently generic markup has been seen as primarily useful for documents, where the utility of schemas is admittedly limited for anything but authoring applications. The idea of using XML as a software engineering tool to model data structures has now become very prevalent. * Critical mass: I'll put more effort into something if I can leverage it across a wide user base. It's worth the effort to craft XML Schemas and distribute them because the community is so much bigger than it was in the good old SGML days. * Communications infrastructure: Something like an automatic discovery mechanism for schemas would not be possible without widespread access to a common network infrastructure. * The schema language itself: IMHO DTDs are the weakest part of the current XML standard. Hats off to the SGML inventors (I already got told off for giving Dr. Goldfarb all the credit): most of what they started doing in the 60s works very well in the late 90s. DTDs don't, as the many "how do I combine these DTDs in a single instance" messages to this list attest. A metalanguage that makes it easier to work with, combine and extend schemas might plausibly increase willingness to use schemas. So yes, some degree of skepticism is certainly in order, but this could end up making the difference of an order of magnitude in the influence that XML ends up having on information technology. We'll see. Matthew xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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