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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Limericks, Stupidity, and Reality (was Re: [ANN] XML LimerickCo
 1/11/2002 5:51:13 PM, Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@s...> wrote: > > Some work remains to be done here. First, > I have not represented word boundaries or > punctuation here. ... Well, Osama/Usama has apparently set back XQuery by a few hours, and I can understand why Michael Rhys thinks it's time to put this thread out of its misery. But I think that at least the sub-thread about validating limericks raises some fairly interesting issues. At one point today, I was thinking "jeez, if a pure XML validator can't even identify a "properly scanning" limerick without extensive markup, just what IS it good for?" Limericks are indeed a fairly trivial use case for XML, but many of the same "validation" issues discussed here such as cleverness, neologisms, weird rhyming scheme, etc. are no worse than the non-structural validation criteria that apply to purchase orders or whatever: A purchase order must not only have the right tags and types in the right places, it must be from an established customer with sufficient credit to pay, and the products ordered must not only be in the catalog but in inventory as well, and the shipping address must be a real place within our shipping area, and all sorts of other things that no XML type system could ever cover. But then I remembered John Cowan's original complaint -- the thread may be full of inspired doggerel, but not very many actual "limericks." Intelligent people can be quite clever at coming up with interesting neologisms, bizarre rhymes, and cryptic flames, but they don't seem to be able to count the damn syllables!!!! So, even if the limerick validator merely did a rough check to reject mechanical violations of the limerick "schema", it would be doing some good. So -- if we lived in a world where properly-scanning limericks had some economic value and there were various limerick processors that understood instances of some limerick schema -- I could imagine using an XML validator to catch the truly stupid mistakes rather than wasting the human judges time on them. ON THE OTHER HAND, if someone is investing in some automated (presumably heuristic or AI-based) "judge" of the quality of the limericks (or the business value of the purchase order), it's not clear that the XML validation step adds anything of value. Sure, it's simple (once that DTD is finished, get to it, Jonathan!), but what value does the XML validation phase add? I'm still of the opinion that the RE parse and dictionary lookup *procedure* would be a lot easier to code than to develop the DTD/schema, so why not just put that quick-screen code at the front end of the more complex "validation" process? Counter-arguments that I can think of include a) the declarative description of the constraint system is more provably correct than the equivalent procedural code to check the constraints; b) the declarative validation can be done with well-tested off-the- shelf tools rather than buggy one-off code [but the schema could be buggy!], c) ordinary blokes using wizzy Schema editors could more easily produce the schema than they could produce the equivalent code ... These all seem a bit contrived to me! So, what do people think ... have we just stumbled on a couple of non-typical examples (limericks and purchase orders) where "type" validation is a fairly trivial subset of what a "real" validator would do? Are XML validations mainly useful when they are relatively easily "programmed" and can be put into a human-oriented evaluation process with lots of chances for over-ride of an inappropriate rejection? Is it REALLY going to be easier for inhabitants of the Real World to develop useful declarative schemas than useful procedural code? Educate me! 
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