[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: A Plea for Schemas
Tim Bray wrote: > > At 12:07 AM 11/2/99 -0600, Paul Prescod wrote: > >By the time you have a schema for your domain you have mapped out your > >communal understanding of that domain. > > This is a surprising and counter-intuitive assertion that needs some > supporting evidence. I disagree. I think large parts of the the > "communal understanding" live in wetware between human ears and in messy > procedural code. I agree. But there is also a huge amount of communal MIS-understanding that lives in wetware. It is flushed out through the process of formalization. For instance we all talk about "links" but it is only in trying to formalize XLink that it became clear that we all used the word to mean radically different things. You can also use UML, set theory or Zen meditation to flush out misunderstanding but schema writing has the big advantage of providing immediate, interactive utility. Some customers say: "You mean we have to go to all of this work to understand our problem domain before we implement the code? Who has time for that?" The more saavy ones say: "finally we have an excuse to map our our problem domain without feeling like we are wasting time drawing pretty pictures." > >In many areas that *is* cracking > >the nut. > > Where I work, people aren't satisfied until there's running code that > does useful stuff, and the schema-ware is an essential but fairly small > component of getting there. I often start with two piece of running code and finding the common language between them *is the problem*. In other cases, of course, the schema is done before I come in and they want help with the code. > > As a practical example, consider word processing. By now there > >are dozens of word processors and desktop publishers. It would be a > >massive effort to come to understand their commonalities and define the > >"universal DTP language." > > Huh? Weren't we talking about schemas? -T. Sure, we're talking about a schema for the common language between word processing programs. Once you have such a thing, writing converters into and out of it is relatively tricky ... its the figuring out the commonalties between the different models that is the hard (perhaps impossible) part. Paul Prescod 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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