[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Architecture (was Re: Alternatives to XML Schemas)
[aside on architecture] At 03:23 AM 3/7/2001 +0800, Rick Jelliffe wrote: >Reading Alexander's pattern book "A Pattern Language" yesterday (on the >plane with a guy who had worked with Alexander to build a school in Japan), >he mentions that it seems that shops of the same type are better off being >far from each other so that they have their own unique catchments but that >shops of different types are better off being together because they benefit >from people attracted to other shops. The same might be true of schema >languages: datatypes and Schematron can happily work with other languages >because it is neutral, but I expect that a viable, simple 3rd-generation DTD >would have to either be a subset of XML Schemas and/or be clearly targeted >to have a different catchment (user-base or problem-base.) As long as we're talking about architecture, I've been reading _Learning from Las Vegas_ (Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour; MIT Press, 1977), and taking notes. Here are a few choice bits which might apply to XML development: "Modern architects contradict themselves when they support functionalism and the megastructure. They do not recognize the image of the process city when they see it on the Strip, because it is both too familiar and too different from what they have been trained to accept." (119) "Although architects have not wished to recognize it, most architectural problems are of the expedient type... In general, the world cannot wait for the architect to build his or her utopia, and in the main the architect's concern should belong not with what ought to be, but what is - and with how to help improve it now." (129) "Henri Bergson called disorder an order we cannot see. The emerging order of the Strip is a complex order. It is not the easy, rigid order of the urban renewal project or the fashionable 'total design' of the megastructure. It is, on the contrary, and manifestation of an opposite direction in architectural theory." (52) You can guess that I'm not fond of megastructures, whatever their requirements... We now return to our regular angle bracket programming. Simon St.Laurent Associate Editor O'Reilly and Associates
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