[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Goodbye to textual applications?
----- Original Message ----- From: "John Evdemon" <jevdemon@v...> > On Friday, December 21, 2001 4:45 PM, Paul T wrote: > > > > I tried using DTDs, I found that all the time it ends with writing > > yet another validating layer. > > > You'll need this with schema as well. XML Schema is not a substitute > for business processes. Exactly! The 'universal validator' is not possible ( neither is 'universal XML transfromer' ) that's why I think that openness of the engine, balancing and binding is more important than placing parts of interpreter inside the engine. Nobody would use Yacc if the only thing Yacc would do would be 'just validation' of something. For some reason, with DTDs people claim that 'just validation' with DTDs or XSDs or whatever is 'all we need' for XML files. How come? Yes, I've seen some attempts to bind Java with XSD, but I don't really like what I saw. That's why I say that I see no solution yet. Ideally, the XML schema language could / should provide : 1. Inheritance and 'mutability' ( in the situation, when Schemas get tweaked by different people and maybe some parts of the schema come from one website and the rest comes from another website ( webservices and B2B ) 2. Binding ( knowledge that some text file matches the schema is not enough. We need to do something with the file and doing it from scratch, ignoring the knowledge about the file structure that we *already* got, when validating it , looks ... strange. In regexprs this was solved with regexprs v 2 - ( Perl's $1 e t.c. ) 3. Well-thought, minimal subset of the 'validation', with the clear understanding that in the real life there always be the next validating layer because 'universal business validator' is not possible, so there is no need to put 'everything one can think of' into the core. Like Yacc needs more 'options' and 'types'. It does not, because it is well balanced. I have no solution to this entire puzzle and solving just a part of it is not a solution, actually. Solving just a part of the puzzle results in ill designed things, like XPath. Of course SQL is not ideal, but when designing the syntax, they have thought about the updates. XPath does not care about the updates, has made some syntax decisions that prevent elegant updates and this mess now would be a problem for a very long time. So is with DTDs / XSD. They're not a solution. Sorry. I think DTDs and XSDs provide nice job security. Like C++ does. Like COBOL does. So perhaps they're a 'solution' in some sense. It would be stupid to assume that most of software developers are idealists, who only want to make this world a better place. Idealists are rare, no matter what's the profession. Rgds.Paul.
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