[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Caught napping!
[Tim Bray] >As I've said before, > >1. the only normative definitions of XML, and of Namespaces, > operate almost completely at a syntactic level. >2. I've been in software for 20 years and I've seen lots > of interoperable cross-platform syntax and very rarely > an interoperable cross-platform data structure or API. > >Obviously, once you're dealing with some XML inside of >a program, you think in terms of the structure. But XML's >interoperability is strongly linked to the fact that >its definition is syntactic. -Tim Tim, This sure reads well but, gee, I'm up to my tonsils in XML interoperability problems and I'm supposed to be a specialist in this stuff! Heaven help non-specialist John Q. Webhacker out there. I'd sure like to investigate the possibility that XML's lack of a data-model is a fundamental source of my problems. Anything is better than standing still where I currently am, spinning my wheels with interopability problems. Consider this: we have people like Joe English - hardly a neophyte to XML - on this list saying it is such a drag to get get parsers to *find* DTDs that he just uses them for documentation[1]. If Joe has concluded he is better off without DTDs what hope for the rest of use. Consider this: this week and last, I have spent most of my waking houses trying to get one industry leading standards compliant XML editor to edit XML in a form that will not cause a standards compliant Browser to choke or display crud on the screen. Really simple stuff. Or should be! In my experience, put any two XML apps together and you have an integration problem. Any XML systems I've built or seen that do not have interoperability problems just use start-tags, end-tags attribute values and PCDATA. Monastic XML. Anything else is a nightmare. As for namespaces, don't get me started on namespaces! Could some of the people who find XML interoperability a complete walk in the park please send their CVs to me immediately? I'm on the verge of concluding that I'm too old for this, or to stupid or both. I hate to spoil the party folks but while we are fiddling with internal document type declaration subsets on this list, I fear that all around us, Rome burns. </Rant> -- Rant does not have a start-tag because this is a streaming mode e-mail :-) [1] http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200111/msg00309.html
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