[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: infinite depth to namespaces
At 02:29 PM 30/08/01 -0700, Michael Brennan wrote: >The problem is, if we yield to these notions, XML does not have a very >bright future. The consensus that some are trying to achieve on the matter >of what is the correct practice for the one information set all schemas >should present to all applications is simply not achievable. Don't sweat it. The only normative definition of XML is syntactical. The only normative definition of namespaces is syntactical. These definitions are implemented by tons of interoperable software. The Infoset, simply because it has come after XSLT and XPath and DOM and SAX chronologically, is an afterthought. The PSVI is an elaboration of that afterthought. Working programmers are generating XML with various flavors of print() statement and reading it through a variety of interfaces (including Notepad :)) and not apparently having too much difficulty. XSDL and its competitors are an unqualifiedly good thing. They provide immensely better expressive hooks for the language designer and for the authoring program that wishes to support a human in direct creation of XML content. The data typing system will have lots of supporting libraries which will facilitate all sorts of interchange tasks. So let's not diss the contribution of the schema folks. The overwhelming majority of real XML deployments at this time do not do runtime DTD validation, and it's hard to believe that they'll do runtime schema validation. In very many cases the knowledge that is encoded declaratively in schemas ends up being re-encoded procedurally in compiled code, along with all sorts of other business-logic sanity checks (e.g., is this a real employee ID number?). I do think however that there will be lots of callouts to libraries built around the XSDL data types, for doing validation and conversion at run-time. Matt Fuchs et al are throwing around interesting experimental ideas about getting a cleaner mapping between names and definitions, which is a complex and non-obvious problem, and more power to them. But I don't think that all the PSVI theorists in the world, laid end-to-end, are any threat to the everyday working usefulness of XML. -Tim
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